Abstract

This book, which is thematically linked with Humanism and Terror, marks another of Merleau-Ponty’s attempts to come to grips with Marxism. Adventures presents reflections on the struggle between the proletariat and the Party for a valid revolutionary praxis. The question for Merleau-Ponty is, are we to conceive the revolution as a spontaneous, necessary uprising of the proletariat, in which case the Party is superfluous; or is the proletariat the tool of the Party, in which case the Party is superior and the proletariat is reduced to an instrument which does not know its own purpose. The first half of the book is Merleau-Ponty’s reading of classic Marxist attempts to come to grips with this question, including discussions of the early Lukács, Lenin, and Trotsky. The reading is not intended to be a rigorous historical account but rather a philosophical interpretation culminating in the recognition that if either the Party or the proletariat become supreme then the dialectic, which is so central to all Marxist thought, is lost.