Jérôme Melançon

Modalité d'un rapport aux autres déjà institué autant que manière de fonder, par transformation et création, de nouvelles communautés de faire, l'action politique doit toujours composer avec l'adversité que lui opposent le monde et les institutions sociales. Face à cette entrave, l'ambiguïté dont toute intention relève par son inscription dans la contingence historique constitue la brèche à travers laquelle peuvent surgir liberté, vérité et perspectives de changement. En offrant une analyse des structures de l'expérience et de l'action politiques qui reconnaît et assume ce mélange incontournable, Merleau-Ponty ouvre la voie à une attitude qui fait des impératifs d'universalité et de coexistence les guides de toute politique. Jérôme Melançon a patiemment réuni à travers l'ensemble du corpus merleau-pontien les éléments épars de ce qui constitue une véritable philosophie politique. Son ouvrage rend compte des nombreuses analyses que Merleau-Ponty a consacrées à cette dimension centrale de l'existence humaine, et à travers lesquelles, fidèle à l'attitude phénoménologique, le philosophe a interrogé les problèmes universaux de la violence, de l'injustice ou de la réforme selon les conditions concrètes que l'actualité de son époque leur avait conférées. Cette interrogation aux marges de la philosophie, élaborée autant à partir de ses travaux sur la perception, l'expression ou l'ontologie, que sur ses lectures de Montaigne, Machiavel et Marx, poursuit la tâche, à. reprendre aujourd'hui, d'une clarification des enjeux politiques à même de saisir les possibilités offertes, encore et toujours, à l'action."--Page 4 of cover.

The contributors to this book offer productive new readings of Merleau-Ponty’s political philosophy and of other facets of his thought. They each deploy his theories to adopt a critical stance on urgent political issues and contemporary situations within society. Each essay focuses on a different aspect of political transformation, be it at the personal, social, national, or international level. The book as a whole maps out possibilities for thinking phenomenologically about politics without a sole focus on the state, turning instead toward contemporary human experience and existence.

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology also extends to politics, which he does not only understand from a Marxist point of view. In his articles on Montaigne and Machiavelli, he operates a reduction of the political subject in order to show how it is always already involved in the world, in history and in political affairs, how these phenomena appear to it, and how it can act. In this light, the ‘Preface’ to Humanism and Terror presents both a description of the demands of political judgment and action, and a statement of Merleau-Ponty’s position as a political subject in postwar France

Contemporary democratic theory, in its focus on the distinction between a private and a public sphere, tends to exclude emotions from political life. Arendt, Habermas, and Angus present critical theories of politi­cal action and deliberation that demand that emotions be left behind in favour of a narrower rationality. On the basis of a first step toward incorporating emotions into political life as accomplished by Martha Nussbaum – despite its limitations – and of a second step taken by Sara Ahmed, an outline of a theory of emotions becomes possible, and brings into question the distinction between private and public life. Emotions act as motivations that accompany every instance of participation or for non-participation, be it because of apathy or of disengagement.

The book Identité et primauté d’autrui presents a study of intersubjectivity in Merleau-Ponty. Subjectivity emerges against a background of a world shared with the other, a human world, and is preceded by its relationship to the other. The assumption of the primary character of this relationship takes on the shape of hospitality. Such a politics of hospitality is opposed to state politics aiming for cultural security and the defense of values, taking their origins in neoconservatism and notably deployed against immigration and mixity. This original study of hospitality, departing from Merleau-Ponty in an original manner while remaining anchored in the Phenomenology of Perception, offers a response to the need to protect an unavoidable ontological pluralism.

Francis Jeanson (1922-2009) produced a number of books and articles about the economic and political situation in French-colonized Algeria, which accompanied his concrete political involvement in support of the Algerian national liberation struggle. He eventually offered his reinterpretation of his own political action, which goes hand in hand with his view of the role of the philosopher. This article looks at Jeanson's interpretations of this engagement, in order to explore the connections he made between political action and philosophy in practice as well as in theory. The concept of concrete solidarity provides a thread to move backward through his studies, statements, and recollections on Algeria, anti-colonialism, and democracy both within the metropole and in relation to its colony.

By looking at the manner in which Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu have sought to understand the political nature of their work and explained their interventions in political affairs, this article defines the action they saw as possible and necessary for intellectuals. As it can only involve others, this action can take the form of dialogue and explanation or of a collective intellectual. In the texts where they reflect on their political involvement outside of parties and government, both authors assert the impossibility to evade politics. By comparing their positions, we begin to develop a critical phenomenology.

This article attempts to bring together the life, situation, and philosophical work of the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka in order to present his conception of philosophy and sacrifice and to understand his action of dissent and his own sacrifice as spokesman for Charter 77 in light of these concepts. Patočka philosophized despite being barred from teaching under the German occupation and under the communist regime, even after he was forced to retire and banned from publication. He also refused the official philosophical categories of communism and, what is more, criticized the very manner in which its ideology allowed it to function. Against the destruction of moral and political life by communist and liberal regimes alike, he outlined the necessity of a “life in the idea” that would be responsive to the notion of sacrifice. Such a position of distance from the things of the world which remains anchored among them is meant to respond to dissatisfaction with the world as it is found and is the very movement of human freedom. Taken together, these three aspects of his philosophical practice made him a dissident, a role he took on more completely when, as part of the Charter 77 movement, he publicly opposed the state, in a course of action that led to his death