Abstract
In his lecture on Levinas, Jacques Derrida affirms that “the violence of light” (WD 84)1 is the violence which bellows at the origin of all violence. Light here means the “Platonic light”, “the truth which arrives as the third party, the truth ‘which we look toward together’”, or “the judgmental arbitrator’s truth” (WD 91). This truth which claims universality, i.e., requires a fit “whenever, everywhere, with everyone”, presupposes Reason which transcends at one and the same time individuality and historicity, so that it excludes the “Other”.
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Notes
WD signifies Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). See Etienne Balibar, “Violence et politique — Quelques questions, in Marie Louise Mallet (ed.), Le Passage des frontières ( Paris: Galilée, 1994 ).
Non-violence as the maintenance of the existing relation. Legality itself is a means of suppression“ (NI 102).
Shoichi Matsuba, “L’ambiguïté de la liberté — une étude sur le manuscrit de Merleau-Ponty `La liberté, en particulier chez Leibniz’ ”, Recherches sur la philosophie et le langage, no. 15, May 1993, pp. 249–259.
In the manuscripts of the 1940s, there remain some reading memos on German Ideology and the Economic and Philosophical Manuscript. In a lecture draft of his later years, he tries again to find a possible new conception of “praxis” in the early thought of Marx (“Philosophie et non-philosophie depuis Hegel — Note de cours”, Texte établi et présenté par Claude Lefort, II, Textures, nos. 10–11 [ 1975 ], pp. 145–173 ).
Merleau-Ponty wrote as follows in a manuscript of the 1940s: “There is no resolution in the victory of either side [liberalism and communism]. Be conscious of a political problem. A minimum program and a course different from this program” (NI 217). In this sense Merleau-Ponty did not totally “agree” with Marxism even in the 1940s.
The concept of “truth” is maintained at the same time, but it is clear that here, the concept of truth is no longer universal. “Here are critics of the evident and absolute standard (criterion). Nevertheless, the idea of truth is maintained” (NI 241).
We may call such a position the principle of pluralism. Cf. Shoichi Matsuba, “Pluralism”, in Seventy-five Keywords to Comparative Cultural Studies 1 (in Japanese) ed. Minoru Takeunchi and Mishikawa Nagao ( Tokyo: Saimaru Shuppan, 1994 ).
Many historical theories are to be found in the manuscript of the 1940s. We have shown here only their outline. We expect to elucidate the total number in the future.
It is the following text that Merleau-Ponty refers to here (cf. OB 4): Raymond Aron, Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire, essai sur les limites de l’objectivité historique ( Paris: Gallimard, 1938 ).
Before Althusser presented a new interpretation of Marx, and the appearance of so-called structuralism invented a different atmosphere, Merleau-Ponty emphasized in Adventures of the Dialectic and various articles (in Signes), the institutional and symbolic character of historical acts which can be recognized in any kind of historical acts, and so recognized the importance of anonymous structure. Simultaneously, it followed from this transition to the point emphasized that the universalistic interpretation of history began to waver“ (Bernhard Waldenfels, Verhaltensform und Verhaltenskontext, in B. Waldenfels u. a. (Hrsg): Phänomenologie und Marxismus, Bd. 2, Frankfurt a.M., 1977, S. 134–157 ).
Merleau-Ponty shifts his argument on the Other from a position of communion based on the identity of perceptual experience in the Phenomenology of Perception, to a position of communication in the draft of “Mexican Lectures” in the 1940s. Cf. Shoichi Matsuba, “From Communion to Communication: A Study of Merleau-Ponty’s Mexican Lectures”, Analecta Husserliana, Vol. 48 ( Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press, 1996 ).
Undecidability between communication and struggle, dialectics which include each of these two elements, are the themes that Merleau-Ponty searched for broadly in his articles of the 1940s“ (Sonia Kruks, ”Communication and Conflict in Merleau-Ponty’s Political Philosophy“, in Henry Pietersma (ed.), Merleau-Ponty — Critical Essays [London, Md.: University Press of America, 1989 ], pp. 177–195 ).
Although Whiteside’s argument, which points up the unity between violence and universality in Merleau-Ponty, gives us much that is suggestive, we must be opposed to his conclusion that the “new liberalism” means a new universalism. Kerry H. Whiteside, “Universality and Violence: Merleau-Ponty, Malraux, and the Moral Logic of Liberalism”, Philosophy Today, Vol. 35, no. 4 (Winter 1991), pp. 372–389.
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Matsuba, S. (1998). The Claim of Universality and Violence: Merleau-Ponty’s Theory of Violence. In: Tymieniecka, AT., Matsuba, S. (eds) Immersing in the Concrete. Analecta Husserliana, vol 58. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1830-1_11
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