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13 - Thinking Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Taylor Carman
Affiliation:
Barnard College, New York
Mark B. N. Hansen
Affiliation:
Princeton University, New Jersey
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Summary

THE SITUATION OF THE PHILOSOPHER

Is the philosophy of our age, Sartre asks, dead or alive? Must we cultivate the field or raze the moldering edifice? Yet thought rejects stark choices of this kind. We know full well that Marx did not demolish Hegel, that Kant did not leave Cartesianism in ruins. How could a serious assessment of Marxism be captured in a simple verdict? Consider instead what Merleau-Ponty tells us in the Introduction to Signs:

The history of thought does not summarily pronounce: This is true; that is false. Like all history, it has its veiled decisions. It dismantles or embalms certain doctrines, changing them into “messages” or museum pieces. There are others, on the contrary, which it keeps active. These do not endure because there is somemiraculous adequation or correspondence between them and an invariable “reality” – such an exact and fleshless truth is neither sufficient nor necessary for the greatness of a doctrine – but because, as obligatory steps for those who want to go further, they retain an expressive power which exceeds their statements and propositions.

Or again: “We are saying that a reexamination of Marx would be a meditation upon a classic, and that it could not possibly terminate in a nihil obstat or a listing on the Index” (S 16–17/10–11).

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2004

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