ABSTRACT
Whether and to what extent Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology can be read as political is still disputed today. This chapter first briefly reconstructs Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body and then turns to the unjustly marginalized writings Humanism and Terror and Adventures of the Dialectic. In this way, it is not just possible to work out the political content that pervades Merleau-Ponty’s entire oeuvre. Rather, a method of political phenomenology peculiar to him can also be made visible. This had a great influence on Claude Lefort’s political philosophy and thus on the currently prominent strand of radical democratic theory.
