Toward a Political Ontology: Merleau-Ponty, Textures, and the Roots of the Theory of the Institution of the Social

In the early 1950s, the inquiry on the relation between perception and expression opened to Maurice Merleau‐Ponty a wider field of research that pointed to what both unites and separates perception and expression, that is to say, ontology. This indirect ontology would have been presented in Le visible et l'invisible. In 1971, ten years after Merleau‐Ponty's premature death, the journal L'Arc dedicated an issue to his thinking. The volume began with an essay signed by Claude Lefort and continued with articles by Cornelius Castoriadis and Marcel Gauchet. Indeed, as this article explains, in these same years, these thinkers were working in the legacy of Merleau‐Ponty's phenomenology to find a new way of thinking about the social.