Aus der Tiefe der Geschichte

Abstract Given the state of the world in 1945, how could one not fall into despair? How could history be seen as anything other than the reflection of past responsibilities, complicities, or indifference? This central question is undoubtedly one of the philosophical and political starting points for Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. Refusing to uphold the notion of an unconditional human freedom in the face of what could be conceived as the dramatic culmination of human history, refusing, that is, to think in spite of history – Merleau-Ponty takes history itself as the very material from which thought must begin anew. A mixed environment, shaped as a chiasm, traversed and formed by sedimented determinations yet also a site of human inventiveness, history appears for Merleau-Ponty as the ‘thickness’ – constantly re-founded and revisited – of a conditional freedom whose epistemological status and political fecundity are strikingly original. It is this alternative way of thinking history that we must now recover, for it opens up the possibility of another history altogether.