The Flesh of the Social and the Enigma of Democracy

MARTIN PLOT

Tampa Bay

Congreso; 2003 International Social Theory Consortium; 2003

Social Theory Consortium

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, published in 1945, was a systematic critique of both the empiricist and idealist understandings of the sensible experience. These approaches, he told us, remained trapped in the pendulum that goes from an immaterial idea of the subject to a positive notion of the object, between the for-itself and the in-itself. However, his The Visible and the Invisible, the book he was writing at the moment of his death in 1961, tries to go even further. On the one hand, the work is unfinished in the obvious sense that the author himself was unable to exhaust his own impulse and shape his ideas in the more or less conclusive form of a finished book. But, on the other hand, it is unfinished in the awkward way in which even finished works are—i.e., The Visible and the Invisible is, and cannot avoid being, a beginning that becomes, in others, an inspiration that will lead to new, unforeseen horizons. The central notion of Merleau-Ponty’s late work is that of flesh—a reversible and indeterminate element that cannot be reduced to the old notions of subject or object. The notion of flesh, particularly when used to describe the complex intermingling of the social and the political in modern societies, would later become the horizon in which Claude Lefort, his former student, friend, and editor, would inscribe what he called the “enigma of democracy.” This paper is an attempt to prepare the field for a theory of democracy that will put at the center of its normative considerations the questions of political society and political action in contemporary democracies.