Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics After Anti-Humanism

In this important new book, Diana Coole shows how existential phenomenology illuminates and enlivens our understanding of politics. Merleau-PontyOs focus on embodied experience allows us to approach political life in a manner that is both critical and engaged. With breadth of vision and penetrating insight, Coole demonstrates that political questions were always central to Merleau-PontyOs philosophical project. Her examination of his complete body of work presents us with a rigorous philosophy that maintains our capacities for agency despite moving beyond a philosophy of the subject.

In this important new book, Diana Coole shows how existential phenomenology illuminates and enlivens our understanding of politics. Merleau-Ponty's focus on embodied experience allows us to approach political life in a manner that is both critical and engaged. With breadth of vision and penetrating insight, Coole demonstrates that political questions were always central to Merleau-Ponty's philosophical project. Her examination of his complete body of work presents us with a rigorous philosophy that maintains our capacities for agency despite moving beyond a philosophy of the subject.

Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics after Anti-humanism is the first major work on Merleau-Ponty's political philosophy in over two decades. Coole presents his later philosophy offlesh as the outline for a new understanding of the political, which forms the basis for reconsidering humanism after, but also through, anti-humanism. She also shows how Merleau-Ponty's concern with contingency anticipated arguments by thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, while sustaining a robust sense of politics as the domain of collective life. The result is a philosophical analysis that speaks to our contemporary concerns in which we seek a coherent account of our actions, our environment and ourselves, such that we might become exemplary political actors within a complex and uncertain world.

Chapter 1 Situating and Reading Merleau-Ponty as a Political Thinker
Part 2 The Critique of Rationalism
Chapter 3 A Crisis of Modernity?
Chapter 4 The Critiques of Ideology, Liberalism, and Capitalism
Chapter 5 Adventures and Misadventures of the Dialectic
Part 6 In Pursuit of the Interworld
Chapter 7 Phenomenology as Critical Theory
Chapter 8 Living History, Practising Politics
Chapter 9 Negativity, Agency, and the Return to Ontology
Part 10 The Politics of the Body, the Flesh of the Political
Chapter 11 The Phenomenology of the Sexed/Gendered Body and the Metaphorics of the Flesh
Chapter 12 The Flesh of the Political After Anti-Humanism