Maurice Merleau-Ponty: A decapitated dialectic

Abstract

This presentation has a strictly exploratory character and develops around a set of theoretical problems addressed by the postwar Merleau-Ponty. It is a set of philosophical formulations of important theoretical complexity to think about functions, models and
intellectual developments in the horizon of cultural formations. The notions of project and institution in the personal and public history suppose, in the frame of this thought, an alternative to the determinations of the philosophy of the conscience without falling in the structuralist challenge of the subject as an active component in the dialectic of the history. In tension with the conscious processes of constitution of objects, both notions would allow in fact to articulate a model of historical research capable of accounting for intellectual and creative projects from a perspective of instituting and non-constituent subject; that is, defining a profile that is not presumed as “negative” but as “alternative and differential” with respect to those with which it must coexist in the world’s prose.