Merleau-Ponty Between Subjectivity and Power

Abstract

Merleau-Ponty Between Subjectivity and Power Michael Brownstein (bio) Diana Coole. Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics After Anti-Humanism. Plymouth, UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. 288 pages. $29.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0742533387 Existential phenomenology is political. This could be a scholastic claim, given the wide-ranging influence of canonical existential phenomenologists like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty on prominent continental political theorists such as Habermas, Foucault, Derrida, Arendt, Rorty, Butler and Taylor. Or it might be an historical claim, given Merleau-Ponty and Sartre’s personal involvement in political struggles, for example (and Heidegger’s own unhappy involvement, which is political in a different way). But the central, and original, claim of Diana Coole’s Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics After Anti-Humanism is that existential phenomenology, at its best, is political.1 Coole focuses on Merleau-Ponty because more than any other existential phenomenologist, she argues, he came to develop an account of being-in-the-world that showed how everyday “coexistence,” as uncovered by phenomenological inquiry, is always suffused with practices of power and conflict. Furthermore, because he recognizes that power as well as rationality is woven into the fabric of the intersubjective world, Merleau-Ponty is uniquely capable, Coole claims, of situating embodied agents between an antiquated “philosophy of the subject” and an overzealous antihumanist “philosophy of power.” Her central task is twofold, then: to show how existential phenomenology is political, and to show how Merleau-Ponty’s political existential phenomenology succeeds where others do not. In contrast to those who interpret Merleau-Ponty’s later political writings as a substantive departure from his earlier, more traditionally phenomenological studies, Coole argues that Merleau-Ponty’s politics represented a radicalization and critical deepening of his earlier work. (2007, 13–14) The relatively early Phenomenology of Perception, she argues, “presents something of a methodological schema for Merleau- Ponty studies, including those of politics.” (126) This argument for continuity is founded by the claim that Merleau-Ponty, following Husserl, understood modern philosophy and politics alike to be held captive by various manifestations of a singular crisis. (160) The crisis was modern rationalism, and Merleau-Ponty’s abiding goal was to find alternatives to it. Coole defines rationalism: “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.” (26) In other words, modern rationalism separates an ideal realm of values and thought from material life but fails to recognize the relativity of its own presuppositions. (42) Rationalist philosophy and practices have no account of their own genealogy or contingency. Of greatest consequence, then, is that rationalism is dangerous because collective practices and political institutions enact the founding ontological presuppositions of a culture; problems with mind-body and subject-object dualisms, for example, manifest in unhealthy social relations. “Ideas become diffused across lifeworlds as taken-for-granted horizons for thought and action,” Coole writes, often with tragic and violent consequences. (69 and 78) The creativity, erudition, and even risky nature of Coole’s account turns up most strikingly where she traces Merleau-Ponty’s critique of rationalism through his many disparate interests. Merleau-Ponty’s critique of intellectualism and empiricism in Phenomenology of Perception can be analogized to his critique of liberalism and communism, she argues. Throughout the book Coole suggests, directly and indirectly, that all of the following dualities are in some sense manifestations of rationalist assumptions: • Intellectualism/Empiricism • Idealism/Realism • Mental/Material • Liberalism/Communism • Morality/Positivism • Early Marx/Late Marx • Rationality/Power • The West/The Other • Agency/Structure The former of these dualities are all attributes, outgrowths, or entailments of subject-centered philosophy; the latter are various terms of force. In each case, subjectivist and objectivist prejudices represent two sides of the same rationalist coin, the baleful effects of which are as notable in theories of perception as they are in political life. And in contrast to all of them, as Merleau-Ponty writes in the preface to the Phenomenology, “the question is always how I can be open to phenomena that transcend me, and which nevertheless exist...