A philosophy that was prematurely cut short by the death of its author cannot be criticized for being inconclusive. But there has often been too great a tendency to see the suspension of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre as the ultimate expression of a mode of thought whose strength would lie entirely in its incompletion. Rather than treating it as a kind of open-air quarry, from which concepts and arguments could be extracted to one’s liking, this book aims at reconstructing the organic trajectory of a living thought. Drawing both on published works and unpublished manuscripts, Emmanuel Alloa suggests a completely novel approach, that accounts for both the evolution and the internal coherence of an ongoing interrogation: what does it mean for a world to be a sensible world? Highlighting the importance of the so far underestimated ‘middle phase’, The Resistance of the Sensible World provides both a refreshing new look at a modern classic as well as a guide for the perplexed. While showing how Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre foreshadows some of the crucial openings of contemporary philosophy, the book also argues why sense ever only exists for sensible beings, i.e. for embodied, entangled, situated beings.
“Emmanuel Alloa reads Merleau-Ponty as if for the first time, as if nothing of what has been repeated again and again could be taken for granted.” (Renaud Barbaras)