Word: merleau
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...Merleau-Ponty's account of Bukharin's behavior is correct, could not Stalin have granted Bukharin his intentions, and condemned his actions? Why make a farce of Bukharin's tragic acceptance of his guilt? Merleau-Ponty did not attempt to answer these questions directly, perhaps because for him Stalinism was not yet over: he continued to work with the French Communist Party until the existence of the labor camps in Russia was revealed a few years later. But he provides the terms for an answer, and suggests the consequences of remaining silent. For Stalin to acknowledge that Bukharin was guilty...
This sounds familiar enough now, but the fact that Merleau-Ponty could write it in 1947 begins to explain how much better prepared he was than most to face the shameful revelations of the fifties...
VIOLENCE in history, Merleau-Ponty concludes, derives from the fact, recorded by Marx in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, that although "men make their own history they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves." History becomes a nightmare for us, because we cannot know in advance whether the detours we think we must take may not become dead-ends, whether the circumstances may not, in the end, defeat us: and because we suspect that the cost of defeat will be too high. Terrorizing others is one response to the anxiety of trying to make history- their terror...
...difficult to know about yourself, and ought to be even more difficult to say aloud that you are not tempted by violence, that when you are violent it is only because you have to be. I believe that this was true of Merleau-Ponty, not just from the little I know of his life, but from the myriad ways in which he resisted the subtler temptation to what might be called intellectual violence. He never allowed himself to seal off his writing from the claims of others, knowing that they would be made, but refusing to judge in advance which...
This sense of discipline is perhaps the place to begin an explanation of Merleau-Ponty's view of Trotsky. For it is Trotsky's discipline, his permanent refusal to compromise in the face of defeat, exile, and assassination that makes him- as Merleau-Ponty put it-sublime. At the same moment, Merleau-Ponty wonders "whether history is made by such men." (p. 80) In part, he means that too strict a rejection of compromise will cramp the possibility of action as quickly as an easy recourse to terrorism. But Trotsky certainly knew that, and as Merleau-Ponty points...