Societies without Bodies and the Bodies of Society: Equality and Reversibility in Lefort and Butler’s Encounters with Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of flesh belongs to his late work and isat the center of three emblematic texts of the period, two of them publishedwhile still alive and the third one published posthumously, edited and supervisedby his early student and then friend and colleague Claude Lefort. Thetexts published in his lifetime, in which the notion of flesh plays a centralrole, are the preface to Signs, originally released in French in 1960, andEye and Mind, first published in the journal Art de France in 1961 and thenrepublished by Gallimard as a short book in 1964. Finally, the most importantelaboration of the notion of flesh appeared in an unfinished manuscript, theone on which Merleau-Ponty was working at the time of his premature death,now known as The Visible and the Invisible. It is here that Merleau-Pontyexplicitly outlines the notion of flesh.