Merleau-Ponty Today

Introduction:
How to explain Maurice Merleau‐Ponty's relative disappearance in the landscape of contemporary thought for almost thirty years? The hypothesis the author puts forward is as follows: if Merleau‐Ponty counted for so little in the history of philosophy for so long, it's because his thought proposed something that was not “identifiable” within the debates of his own time. Neither a full phenomenologist nor a structuralist by anticipation, Merleau‐Ponty is other. This strangeness has to do with a conception of history that simultaneously considers the historical determinations that constitute human beings and their capacity to create. Against all deterministic fatalisms, but also against all metaphysics of freedom, Merleau‐Ponty thinks together the sedimentation effects of what is commonly called history and the virtuality of invention that characterizes human life.