MERLEAU-PONTY BETWEEN MACHIAVELLI AND MARX: NEW ANALOGY OF POLITICAL BODY

This article is the second part of our phenomenological study on the analogy between the body and the political body. Its aim is to confront the previous analysis of Claude Lefort's critique of the ontologies of the Political Body with the Merleau-Pontian thought of history, institution, and corporeality. Indeed, this Merleau-Pontian thought, specifically developed in the courses of the 1950's, allows for a renewal of the analogy itself, via another reading of the Lefortian major inheritance: Machiavelli and Marx. By parallelly following Merleau-Ponty's evolutive reading of these two authors, and the essential changes in his phenomenology of perception, this article thus proposes to disclose the main entry points into a Merleau-Pontian reform of the analogy; an analogy that has to be thought against the ambiguity of the flesh that Claude Lefort inherits precisely from Merleau-Ponty. By discussing this ambiguity that «The Visible and the Invisible» is often charged with via a reading of Merleau-Ponty's courses at the Collège de France — specifically Institution, Passivity, and Nature — this article intends to disclose the political meaning of the concept of intercorporeity, with which the human body will no longer be understood as «one's own body», but rather interpreted in a radically a-subjective way. Moreover, this very concept of intercorporeity specifically opens a novel way to understand the meaning of the central concept of the analogy of the political body itself, namely the concept of incorporation. Indeed, by following Merleau-Ponty's lesser known thought of the 1950's, one can think incorporation against the classical schema of fusion, that is to say, on the opposite, as an encounter of dispossessions, and thus as a path into a new analogy.