Although Merleau-Ponty’s early phenomenology of perception and his essays on art, politics, and language already showed an affinity between the aesthetic phenomena of expression and style and the political and cultural dynamics of society at large, this paper specifically focuses on his late theorizing of the notion of flesh and its relevance to his late understanding of politics and democracy. The emergence of flesh as a concept was contemporary to Merleau-Ponty’s break with Marxism as a philosophical model and with revolutionary (...) dialectics as a political project. It is by showing that such a break was consistently grounded on his theorizing of the being flesh of both the body and of society that this paper shows Merleau-Ponty’s unique contribution to democratic theory and to contemporary political philosophy. In the course of this analysis, it will become clear that in philosophically breaking with the position of a “no that is a yes”—i.e. the model of the revolution, which implies a total negation of the given that becomes a total affirmation of the new order (dictatorship) once in power—he would politically embrace the Weberian “heroic liberalism”—or his “non-communist left”—of parliamentary democracy. (shrink)

Sections of the mass media report so closely on political decision-making that politicians cannot ignore the media when making decisions ; this book questions whether the decision-making process is now more important than any political action deriving from the decisions. Media appearances are no longer adjuncts to the political process ; they are the process.

In this paper, I go back to French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s influence on Claude Lefort’s theory of democracy in order to offer a revised understanding of political regimes as coexisting and competing horizons of politics. These horizons develop from differing positions regarding the political enigma of the institution of society—its staging, its shaping, and its making sense of itself. A theological understanding of such political institution of society will be described as fundamentally voluntaristic, while an epistemic understanding will be described (...) as, in its radical iteration, potentially totalitarian. This theorization is triggered by an interpretive perplexity: what happened to the United States in the aftermath of 9/11, in its War on Terror, in its committing of the supreme international crime of aggressive warfare, in its embracement of a massive policy of executive, global targeted assassinations and of a white nationalist, xenophobic politics? Is the theologico-political horizon becoming once again dominant in America? Is the epistemic, plutocratic regime taking over instead? Are they coordinated in their effort to undermine an egalitarian understanding of the American republic? These are the interrogative driving forces behind this investigation. (shrink)

The goal of this dissertation is to generate a theoretical perspective and a political vocabulary capable of giving an account of political action proper in the context of modern democracy. The first step is that of tracing back to the origins of the theory and practice of modern democracy the appearance of the features that gave shape to the institutional constellation we now understand as democratic politics. This looking back from the perspective of the main institutions of contemporary democracy is (...) structured along the lines of the process that Lefort describes as a split of the theological and the political in early modern times. In Weber, this split takes the form of a multiplication and secularization of prophets, creating the need for a domesticated and democratized version of charismatic leadership that assumes normative standards in his idea of parliamentary democracy. Weber's solution is, of course, the opposite to that of Hobbes': the plurality of gods and demons manifested in the multiplication of prophets should be institutionalized, not eradicated. This dissertation shows that the breakdown of theological regimes and the birth of modern democracy is simply another way to describe the embracement of the fact of plurality. ;With Merleau-Ponty I thus give theoretical consistency to the emergence of modern democratic practices and institutions. In Habermas, on the other hand, I find the difficulties that a model that dismembers the strategic and communicative dimensions of human agency confronts when the task at hand is not that of a moral theory concerned with universal agreement but that of a political theory concerned with the socially enabled fact of plurality. Specifically, I show in my dissertation that Habermas's contempt for Austin's perlocutionary dimension of speech acts and his suggestion that Arendt's notions of action and speech are somehow parallel to his model spring from a still operating uneasiness with political speech and modern democracy in their phenomenal appearance. This dissertation concludes by showing that the theoretical consistency acquired with Merleau-Ponty does indeed provide a theoretical perspective and political vocabulary that puts in relief political action as a fundamental aspect of contemporary democratic politics. (shrink)