References for Theme: Merleau-Ponty Citations
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice
- Phenomenology of Perception (2012)
(p.454) Van Gogh’s painting is forever established in me, a step has been taken that I can never take back, and, even if I hold no precise memories of the paintings that I have seen, my entire aesthetic experience will from then on be that of someone who has known Van Gogh’s paintings, just as a bourgeois who has become a worker remains forever, in his very manner of being a worker, a bourgeois-become-worker, or just as an act defines us forever, even if we have subsequently disavowed it and changed our beliefs. Existence always takes up its past, either by...
- Phenomenology of Perception (2012)
(p.467) If I consider myself in my absolute concretion and such as reflection presents me to myself, then I am an anonymous and pre-human flow that has not yet been articulated as “worker,” for example, or as “bourgeois.” If I later conceive of myself as a man among men, or as a bourgeois among bourgeois, it seems that this can only be a secondary view of myself; I am never a worker or a bourgeois at my very core, but rather a consciousness that freely valuates itself as a bourgeois or a proletarian consciousness. Indeed, my objective place in the circuit...
- Phenomenology of Perception (2012)
(p.469) [As a worker,] I have a certain style of life: I am at the mercy of unemployment and prosperity; I cannot do with my life whatever I please; I am paid on a weekly basis; I control neither the conditions, nor the products of my labor. And as a result, I feel like a foreigner in my factory, my nation, and my life. I am accustomed to dealing with a fatum [destiny] that I do not respect, but that must be humored.
- Phenomenology of Perception (2012)
(p.470) The day-laborer, who has rarely interacted with workers, who does not resemble them, and who is hardly fond of them, sees the price of manufactured objects increasing, as well as the cost of living, and notices that one can no longer make ends meet. It might happen that, in that moment, he blames the workers of the city, and so class consciousness will not be born. If it is born, this is not because the day-laborer has decided to become a revolutionary and, consequently, to confer a value upon his actual condition, but rather because he perceived concretely the synchronicity...
- Phenomenology of Perception (2012)
(p.473) I am situated socially, and my freedom, even if it has the power to commit me elsewhere, does not have the power to turn me immediately into what I decide to be. Thus, being bourgeois or a worker is not merely being conscious of so being, it is to give myself the value of a worker or a bourgeois through an implicit or existential project that merges with our way of articulating the world and of coexisting with others. My decision takes up a spontaneous sense of my life that it can confirm or deny, but that it cannot annul....
- Phenomenology of Perception (2012)
- Humanism and Terror: The Communist Problem (2017)
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