Literature in the Grip of the Dialectic: Merleau-Ponty on Literary Engagement in the Cold War (1953–1955)

In 1955, on 19 April, to be precise, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Les Aventures de la dialectique was published, a work that advanced a radical critique of the ossification of the dialectic and the drift toward totalitarianism in communist politics. Such a position from writers on the right of the political spectrum, such as Raymond Aron, who in the same year published L’Opium des intellectuels, a title that has since served as a shorthand for critiques of the proclaimed “naïve” communist sympathies of intellectuals, would not have come as a surprise. However, the fact that it came from a major left-wing figure—who less than a decade earlier had written in L’Humanisme et terreur (1947) that to renounce the Marxist philosophy of history “is to dig the grave of Reason in history”—could not fail to attract attention. ¹ Aron devoted an essay to it ² and the communist left held a symposium aimed at criticising and rejecting it. The proceedings were published as Mésaventures de l’anti-marxisme and contained contributions from Communist Party officials Roger Garaudy and Jean Kanapa, not to mention a letter from the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács, who rejected Merleau-Ponty's interpretation of his work in Les Aventures de la dialectique. ³

Merleau-Ponty did not respond—not even to Simone de Beauvoir's very critical essay “Merleau-Ponty et le pseudosartrisme”, which appeared in Les Temps modernes (nos. 114–15, June–July 1955), the journal which he co-directed for years. ⁴ Les Aventures de la dialectique effectively brought into the open the rupture between Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, initiated by a series of articles by the latter, “Les communistes et la paix” (1952–1954). In these articles, Sartre drew increasingly close to the Parti communiste français (PCF), which Merleau-Ponty deplored. In Les Aventures de la dialectique he recalls that the initial editorial line of Les Temps modernes held that not being aligned with any party is a condition for critically engaging with reality, since such engagement ⁵ would be impeded by clinging to a well-defined worldview (AD 190/255). ⁶ Concurrently, with the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, Merleau-Ponty moved away from his communist sympathies, as he considered the Soviet Union the initiator of the conflict. ⁷ In most general terms, then, Sartre criticised Merleau-Ponty for withdrawing from politics, while Merleau-Ponty criticised Sartre for drawing too close to the PCF (L 332–33). ⁸

In taking his distance from communist politics, Merleau-Ponty participates in a broader movement in which left-wing intellectuals across Western Europe broke with communism in response to developments in the Soviet Union and the authoritarian practices of communist parties at home. Unfolding in several waves and culminating in the antitotalitarian debates of the late 1970s, this trajectory has been extensively documented in accounts of French intellectual history. ⁹ While Les Aventures de la dialectique mark a clear rupture in Merleau-Ponty's political views, he did not become an “ex-communist”, as Hannah Arendt understood it in a 1953 essay: former communists who entirely define themselves through radical opposition to their former political engagement. Exemplified by Scriassine, a character modelled on Arthur Koestler, in Simone de Beauvoir's novel Les Mandarins (1954), ex-communists defend a Manichaean conception of history as a struggle between opposing forces, within which these renegades assign themselves a decisive role in preventing communism from prevailing. ¹⁰ The main problem that Arendt identifies in this view is a continued belief in human beings as “makers of history”. ¹¹ This is a particularly insightful analysis, as, indeed, underlying Merleau-Ponty's criticism of Sartre's move towards communism, is a philosophy of history that rejects any notion of historical finality.

Neither the quarrel between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, nor the position of the latter within post-war French intellectual history, is the subject of this article. Rather I wish to foreground the question of literature, which forms a crystalline vein running through the massive granite of Les Aventures de la dialectique. Although it appears only intermittently in this major work of political philosophy, as well as in a 1953 letter to Sartre, there are reasons to consider Merleau-Ponty's reflections on the politics of literature as integral to his broader political and philosophical perspective. ¹² As Fredric Jameson argues in Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, literature “plays a central role in the dialectical process.” ¹³ This article demonstrates how it does so by focussing on the discussion of literature in Les Aventures de la dialectique, which has received little attention. ¹⁴ It shows that, for Merleau-Ponty, reflections on the politics of literature are inseparable from an understanding of history and from a broader reconfiguration of the relation between writers and (state) communism.

In order to examine why this theme figures in a book of political philosophy and how Merleau-Ponty's views on the intersection of politics and literature were affected by geopolitical history, I will offer a close reading of Merleau-Ponty's 1953 letter to Sartre, which includes a discussion of Sartre's theory of engagement, as well as of the passages in Les Aventures de la dialectique where the politics of literature are discussed. I will focus on two questions. First, I will examine how the notion of literary engagement, as developed by Sartre, was recasted in this context. I will argue that Merleau-Ponty does so by harnessing a conception of history that sets him apart both from Sartre's position as a fellow traveller of the PCF, as well as from that of “ex-communists” for that matter. Second, I will examine how Merleau-Ponty's reading of Lukács's theory of literature enables him to rethink the intersection of literature and politics. Both the persistent role of literature in debates on political philosophy and its articulation with history reveal the peculiar status literature held at the time, one that might be described, as we will see shortly, as caught in the grip of an ambiguous dialectic.

Merleau-Ponty's 1953 Letter: Engagement in “Globally Strained Times”

Merleau-Ponty began drafting Les Aventures de la dialectique in July 1953, after his rupture with Sartre and after he had left the editorial board of Les Temps modernes, where he had served as political editor. That year, he and Sartre exchanged a few letters, which were only published by the end of the century. ¹⁵ This epistolary exchange starts with an undated letter Sartre send from Rome, in which he deplored the fact that Merleau-Ponty had critically discussed his work during a lecture, “Philosophy and Politics Today”, delivered on 29 May of that year at the Collège de France. He writes that this particularly displeased him, since the political right might profit from hearing of their disagreement (L 332). Merleau-Ponty responded with a long letter on 8 July. He writes that he had always discussed Sartre's work critically, that he had done so with full respect, and, to demonstrate his good faith, he included his lecture notes.

This lecture, hence, arguably forms the starting point of the conflict. After all, what lies at the core of the relation between philosophy and politics is whether, and if so, how thinkers should engage in politics. It must be said that, if Sartre bore a grudge against Merleau–Ponty after hearing about this lecture, this is hardly surprising: the key elements of his critique of the relation between consciousness and history, and between literature and politics, that—as we shall see—structure Les Aventures de la dialectique are already present in the 1953 lecture, albeit in a very summary form. The final chapter of Merleau-Ponty's 1955 book, “Sartre et l’ultra-bolchévisme”, is an extensive philosophical refutation of Sartre's political engagement.

“Engagement” was a key notion in the post-war period. Although it had already circulated in the 1930s, it spread across France and abroad after Sartre started using it, among other places, in his editorial to the first issue of Les Temps modernes. ¹⁶ There, he writes that, as writers, they no longer wish to neglect their responsibility towards historical reality, as had allegedly been the case before. They wanted to be engaged writers. This understanding of engagement is rooted in existential phenomenology: on an ontological level, all human beings are considered engaged in historical reality because they exist in a reality that precedes them and from which they cannot detach themselves. Consciousness is therefore always already engaged in the world. This ontological standpoint translates into a normative view of what they, as left-wing intellectuals, ought to do. It amounts to assuming responsibility for this ontological given—namely that they are engaged consciousnesses (and bodies, for that matter) in historical reality. This entails acquiring a form of reflexivity required for genuinely writerly engagement—one that calls for speaking out against social and political injustices such as the Soviet labour camps or the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage by the United States (both of which are referred to in their epistolary exchange). It also took the form of Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty writing philosophical—and, in the case of the first two, literary—works that addressed contemporary social and political issues.

In the early 1950s, the conception of engagement to which the editorial staff of Les Temps modernes had adhered in the immediate post-war years became the subject of heated discussion. This becomes clear at several points in Merleau-Ponty's 1953 letter to Sartre. “Since the Korean War the cause of the left has been more and more lumped together with communism,” he writes, adding that they “responded to this situation in different ways” (L 343). Whereas Sartre considered it necessary to choose between the Soviet Union and the United States, Merleau-Ponty argued for siding with neither. Merleau-Ponty had, moreover, stopped writing on day-to-day political events after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. Although he acknowledges that some events, such as the Rosenberg trial, demand an immediate reaction, this is not always the case. In Les Temps modernes, he recalls, they had always tried to grasp the broader situation in order to act rightly. He therefore criticises the Sartrean credo of becoming engaged in every event “as if it were a test of morality”, because in doing so “you refuse without reflection a right of correction which no serious action renounces” (L 339). In short, he criticises what he calls Sartre's “constant engagement”, as it neglects the gap between event and judgement (L 338–40). ¹⁷ With regard to “Les communistes et la paix”, Merleau-Ponty concludes that Sartre “took a position without worrying too much about the content, without examining the life of the party in the last forty years, its ideology, its history” (L 345).

While these concerns about the forms that political engagement can take operate at a theoretical level, it must be emphasised that Merleau-Ponty formulates them explicitly in relation to the altered political circumstances of the early 1950s. “In a globally strained situation […] it is artificial—and deceptive—to act as if the problems were posed one by one and to break up into a series of local questions what is historically a unity.” (L 339) A shift in thought is therefore required not only because political circumstances have changed; it is also implied that a notion of political (or literary) engagement can only be considered genuine if it accounts for historical reality in a comprehensive manner. Because Sartre's “constant engagement” draws on mere fragments of political history, it allegedly fails in this respect (L 343–44).

From Merleau-Ponty's perspective, we thus find two positions: either one engages constantly, thereby reducing the distance between philosophy (judgement) and politics (event); or one emphasises the irreducibility of the one to the other, which entails not always taking a position, or at least allowing time before doing so. In this way, Merleau-Ponty differentiates politics from philosophy (his lecture was, after all, entitled “Philosophy and Politics Today”), while nevertheless insisting that philosophy is in the world. This was a major point of criticism in Sartre's undated letter: the accusation that Merleau-Ponty had retreated into the comfortable realm of philosophy. Merleau-Ponty therefore takes care to describe philosophy as, although different from “professional politics”, not so different from “people”: philosophy, like persons, is “paradoxical, incarnate, and social” (L 340–41). What Merleau-Ponty defends throughout the letter, the lecture, and Les Aventures de la dialectique is precisely this hesitant, doubtful, and ambiguous philosophy, one that is part of historical reality. A central point of divergence is thus how the relation between action (politics) and reflection (culture), as well as the realm of the event (history) and that of judgement (consciousness) is to be understood.

As noted, Merleau-Ponty appended the notes of his lecture to his letter. These notes, which discuss the relation between philosophy and politics, comprise five sections: the “classic concept” of this relation (philosophy as “possession of the universal includes politics”), Hegel, Marx, Today, and Sartre. Throughout the final two sections—which make up about two-thirds of the notes—two themes emerge that later return in expanded form in Les Aventures de la dialectique: a brief discussion of the politics of literature (including references to Lukács) and a sustained analysis of (literary) engagement. In both cases, Sartre's position is criticised, and gradually—both in the 1953 lecture and in Les Aventures de la dialectique—Merleau-Ponty's view of history as inter-world emerges. As I will show, this view is closely entangled with his understanding of the intersection of politics and literature, as well as of engagement.

Reframing the Link Between Consciousness and History: Lukács's Theory of Literature

In his lecture notes, before discussing Sartre in the final section, Merleau-Ponty pauses over “today,” which he characterises as marked by “the crisis in the idea of revolution” and “the accelerated decadence of liberalism” (L 348). With regard to the former, he observes that, since 1945 (at least in Europe, he adds), “revolutions have been made ‘from above,’ and the revolution turned into nothing other than the ‘defense of the established order’” (L 348). His claim is that revolutionary dialectics had become ossified, reduced to rigid systems under both the Soviet Union and Western communist parties. In this context, he examines what he terms the “politics of culture,” where a significant tension was evident. On one hand, Zhdanovism (after the Soviet official) promoted socialist realism as the sole legitimate artistic expression of the revolution. In shortest terms, it could be said that it was a Stalinist attempt to subordinate aesthetic form entirely to ideological discipline. On the other hand, there are “the ‘classic’ texts of Engels, Lenin himself, Lukács on art and literature, which recognize in art and literature the force of distinct expression of their value of employment in the immediate struggle” (L 348). Whereas Zhdanovism sought a strict correspondence between ideology and art, this “other” Marxist tradition allowed a multiplicity of forms that exceeded direct revolutionary utility.

The second chapter of Merleau-Ponty's Les Aventures de la dialectique discusses the young Lukács’s Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein (History and Class Consciousness, 1923), which is often credited with inaugurating “Western Marxism”. ¹⁸ The defining feature of this current in Marxist philosophy is its reorientation toward subjectivity, culture, and ideology as historically mediated forms, coupled with criticism of the “orthodox” Marxist philosophy of history. ¹⁹ Both aspects come to the fore in Merleau-Ponty's chapter on Lukács, which devotes particular attention to his theory of literature. ²⁰ One could argue that, in both his lecture and the book, he draws on Lukács to offer an alternative to Sartre's influential theory of literature developed in Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (What is Literature?, 1948). Moreover, this discussion of Lukács’ theory of literature, though seemingly a side note, serves to introduce what Merleau-Ponty regards as the main contribution of Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein—and more broadly of Western Marxism: a sustained reflection on the relation of subjectivity to history, which does not reduce the former to a mere epiphenomenon of the latter. ²¹ Lukács defends “the idea that subjectivity is incorporated in history, not produced by it” (AD 69/94). Through the exposition of Lukács’s theory of literature, Merleau-Ponty thus explores how a different Marxism might conceive the interplay of consciousness and historical reality.

At stake are two competing views of history. Orthodox Marxism treats history as a natural, causal process, inexorably advancing toward the future and conditioning reality. Subjectivity, on this view, is a by-product fully determined by overarching causal, mainly economical processes. This is related to the theory of reflection (Widerspiegelungstheorie), according to which consciousness merely reflects external reality. It is precisely this orthodox “realist” (causal, positivist) Marxism that Lukács’s truly “dialectical” Western Marxism criticises, and that Merleau-Ponty draws on in Les Aventures de la dialectique.

It must be recalled, however, that Lukács’s position is complex. ²² After purportedly initiating Western Marxism with Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein in the 1920s, he became something of an official Soviet philosopher and, as a result, renounced this book on several occasions. Indeed, as mentioned above, Lukács criticised Merleau-Ponty's Les Aventures de la dialectique in a letter for drawing on his early work, which he himself had already renounced. ²³

Merleau-Ponty appears aware of this, noting that Lukács now asserts that “the social is a second nature,” but that he sets the word off in quotation marks. This supposedly indicates that for Lukács, even in the 1940s, while consciousness is maybe not coextensive with the historical dialectic, it is neither simply its reflection (AD 69/94). In Marx und Engels als Literaturhistoriker (1943), to which Merleau-Ponty refers here, Lukács distinguishes between “extensive” and “intensive” reflection, which means “that we are not only in the whole of objective history but that, in another sense, it is wholly in us”. In so doing, Lukács “reestablishes the double relation or ambiguity of the dialectic.” (AD 69/94; my italics) This double relation consists in consciousness being at once a passive reflection of historical reality and an active reflection upon it (AD 43/61). If consciousness were reduced to merely reflecting social and political processes, functioning causally like natural laws, the ambiguity of the dialectic would be erased, leaving only conformity to the revolutionary movement ruled by the Party (AD 69/95). The consequences of this “realist” line thus appear to be serious. As Merleau-Ponty summarises, “For a realist there is not a plurality of viewpoints, a center and a periphery of the dialectic, an intensive totality; there is only a historical process to be observed [constater] and to be followed.” (AD 70/95; translation modified)

One might therefore ask whether the relationship between consciousness and history should be conceived differently. To this end, Merleau-Ponty returns once more to the question of literature. The issue at stake is that, from a “realist” perspective, literature—and cultural production more broadly—is deemed false unless it straightforwardly illustrates the party line. The “realist” approach thus reduces the relation between literature and reality to a simple matter of right or wrong, where works that do not directly reflect the “correct” view of the socio-political situation are, by definition, mistaken. One of the key questions underlying Western Marxism is how, within the realm of the subjective mystifications can coexist with truth, rather than simply treating the superstructure as a distortion of the economic base. For Lukács in Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein, drawing on Marx, what is false forms part of what is true, as a moment within a dialectical process. “Even illusions,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “have some sort of sense and call for deciphering because they always present themselves against the background of a lived relationship with the social whole” (AD 42/58). Since literature, too, is an “expression of the lived world”, it never merely reproduces the mystified perspectives of a single class; rather, it articulates the encounter between classes (AD 42/59). In other words, literature reflects or expresses the links between classes within social totality (le tout social). To some extent, it thus reproduces this totality itself (AD 68/92).

Instead of condemning literature as a mystified superstructure—as “realist” or orthodox Marxists might do—Lukács’s framework allows for a reading in which literature, without necessarily conveying an ideologically correct view of reality, enables readers to critically apprehend reality. Writers, while inevitably situated within limited perspectives, can thus offer insight into the social world. This follows from Lukács’s observation in Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein, cited by Merleau-Ponty, that, subjectively, consciousness is “something which can and should be understood, i.e., as ‘right,’ while at the same time, objectively, it misses the essence of social development and is, in this sense, a ‘false consciousness’.” (AD 42/59; translation modified) ²⁴ This “false consciousness” does not lead Lukács to reject consciousness itself, as an orthodox Marxist might. Its incorrectness indicates that it is incomplete, not fully developed—a step within the dialectic that is simultaneously correct and false. It is precisely this dual nature that gives literature its capacity for immanent criticism (AD 68/92). ²⁵

Literature, like consciousness, is thus an integral part of historical reality, but not as a mere causally determined epiphenomenon. It is comprised in history in far more complex ways: literature does not simply mirror historical events; it is believed to express historical reality through its internal structures rather than through what the author thinks or claims to think, and it does not need to conform to the party line to be of interest. Merleau-Ponty refers to this as the relative autonomy of literature (AD 69/93). This autonomy arguably is the result of the twofold relationship between consciousness and history or, put differently, of the ambiguity of the dialectic: history shapes consciousness, yet consciousness exists within history, speaks of it, and writes about it: “We are in it, but it is completely in us.” (AD 43/61)

Sartre's “Literature of Action”, or his Unmarxist Marxism

Already in the 1953 lecture notes with which we began the previous section, Merleau-Ponty critically contrasts this heterodox Marxist view of literature with Sartre's. He writes that “the conception of engaged literature is tied to the literature of action more tightly than in Engels and Lukács, who are considered representatives of classical Marxism.” (L 349; my italics) In this connection, he refers to the well-known interpretation of the reactionary novelist Balzac, whose early nineteenth-century realist novels allegedly analyse class society with remarkable lucidity because of his reactionary disposition (L 349). There is thus a gap between Balzac's alienated bourgeois consciousness and historical reality, a divergence from which a critical reflection on that society emerges (L 349). Such literature is not a direct means of political action: although engaged in historical reality to a certain extent, it preserves a difference that a Sartrean “literature of action” supposedly overlooks. Drawing on Lukács's assessment of the relation between consciousness and history—from which he derives the view that politics and literature are intertwined yet separated by a necessary difference—Merleau-Ponty asserts that Sartre “puts literature and political action together on a unique plane of the event” (L 349).

In order to understand how Merleau-Ponty invokes Lukács's theory of literature to propose an alternative to Sartre's, we need a clearer grasp of the latter's conception of literature as Merleau-Ponty presents it. To this end, I turn to a few excerpts from the final chapter of Les Aventures de la dialectique (“Sartre et l’ultra-bolchevisme”), where this issue is developed. ²⁶ The central claim running through this long and complex chapter is that Sartre's philosophy fails to overcome its inherent subjectivism. Although Sartre engages with Marxist thought, he does so, Merleau-Ponty argues, from within the framework of his own philosophy, which sharply separates the objective world into which one is thrown (in line with Heidegger's Geworfenheit) from the subjective freedom by which one negates reality and projects oneself into that world. ²⁷ Subjectivity and objectivity, the pour-soi and the en-soi, thus appear as opposed realities rather than—as in Lukács—dialectically intertwined ones.

In the background of the first excerpt I will discuss stands Sartre's Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, his influential series of essays first published in Les Temps modernes and reissued as a book in 1948. In this work Sartre presents literature as a form of “action by unveiling.” He maintains that “[t]he ‘committed’ writer knows that words are action. He knows that to reveal is to change and that one can reveal only by planning to change.” ²⁸ According to Merleau-Ponty, however, Sartre's position later shifts. Whereas in 1948 literature possessed a revolutionary potential, since it changed the world by showing it, nowadays, “the action of unveiling gives way to pure action.” (AD 156/210) This “pure” action is nothing other than consciousness projecting itself towards the future, unmediated by the social and historical world—in Sartre's case, at least as Merleau-Ponty sees it, through the decision to align himself with the PCF. Rather than genuine action in the world, it is an idealist, abstract type of engagement, that wants reality to be the way one thinks it is: “the esteem in principle for pure action remains intact no matter what existing communism is like.” (AD 195/263)

As said above, in his 1945 editorial for Les Temps modernes, Sartre had declared that, after the war, writers no longer wished to be ashamed of being writers. Yet this shame—or bad conscience—appears, in Merleau-Ponty's reading, to persist and, in the early 1950s, to call for an even closer identification of literature with political action. It is no longer sufficient to act by unveiling the historical world: the writer must now act politically, choose sides, and participate directly in political struggle. Once literary engagement is conceived as immediate historical intervention rather than mediated unveiling, literature can no longer retain a distinct function and is compelled to attach itself to an organised political force. The political context is crucial here. By subordinating himself to the PCF—and thereby implying that literature (as well as philosophy) should not obstruct party politics—literature ceases to function as a critical instrument and instead becomes an ideological instrument subordinate to the directives of a political party. This corresponds to Merleau-Ponty's characterisation of the early 1950s as “a time when communism expels those who wish to see.” (AD 178/239–40).

Although Sartre might appear to have modified his views under the growing influence of historical materialism, Merleau-Ponty contends that this is not the case. Sartre does invoke the claim that literature is shaped by the social world rather than solely by the writer's mind, but, in Merleau-Ponty's view, he does so in a distorted way. In Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, the social world “is never cause or even motive, it is never behind the work, it does not weigh on it, it gives neither an explanation nor an excuse for it. Social reality is in front of the writer like the milieu or like a dimension of his intentional directedness [sa visée].” (AD 156/209; my italics; translation modified) Fredric Jameson refers to this passage in a 1972 essay, asserting that Merleau-Ponty points out “the originality of Sartre's view of literature with respect to this materialistic dialectic.” ²⁹ However, Merleau-Ponty rather argues that Sartre fails to overcome an idealistic view of literature. According to Sartre, it is allegedly the writer who chooses about which subject to write, in which style; she can choose whether to serve the bourgeoisie or the masses. Although the writer thus takes position within history (AD 156/209–10), this is not a Marxist perspective as it all comes down to a free choice. For a Marxist, moreover, literature does neither need to be a direct instrument of action, nor should it be the consciousness of the revolution (AD 157/211). Merleau-Ponty suggests that, out of a bad conscience about his position as a writer, Sartre in Qu’est-ce que la littérature? elevates literature to an unduly exalted status, placing it in tension with his ostensibly materialist perspective. What matters is not the writer's explicit political understanding: as the case of Balzac shows, the writer unveils historical reality through lived experience, which may be “false” yet can nonetheless articulate “true” social relations.

The argument is thus that because of Sartre's underlying philosophical premisses literature does not partake in the dialectic. For Marxism, Merleau-Ponty writes, politics forms the centre of the historical dialectic (the infrastructure), while culture occupies its periphery (the superstructure) (AD 43/60–61); for Sartre, however

since there is not a single history behind us to which both our literature and our politics belong, since their unity is to be made by us, since he takes them at their common source, consciousness, then, if they are to touch things, literature must deal with politics, and action must stick to the event as in a novel, taking no distance. (AD 158/212)

Merleau-Ponty's point is that Sartre—unlike those who see literature and politics as both engaged in history, albeit in different ways—feels compelled, because he remains attached to a “philosophy of the cogito” (AD 158/213), to link them consciously. For Lukács, literature is already political insofar as it is embedded within an ambiguous dialectic; for Sartre, by contrast, starting from a consciousness not itself embedded in that reality, ³⁰ literature becomes political only through the writer's free decision to make it address politics. Accordingly, in Qu’est-ce que la littérature? the social world is not behind the work but before the writer: it is something the writer subjectively intends, rather than preconditioning the emergence of the work (AD 156/209). Because both politics and literature are grounded in subjective free choice, one sphere is either subordinated to the other (literature as propaganda or, conversely, literature as pure aesthetic autonomy) or the two are conflated. According to Merleau-Ponty, for Sartre, “literature and politics are the same struggle on the single plane of events” (AD 158/212–13), a claim he had already advanced in his 1953 letter (L 350).

All this has consequences for how literature is conceived. Merleau-Ponty writes that Sartrean consciousness “manages to make prose a transparent glass [a metaphor Sartre used in Qu’est-ce que la littérature?], whereas it never reads unambiguously in historical action.” (AD 189/254) Literature is thus reduced to a clear-cut, transparent take on reality, rather than the unveiling of the opaqueness of our being in it. According to Merleau-Ponty, Sartre's political alignment with the PCF paradoxically rests on an unaltered philosophy of consciousness. As he observes: “Yesterday literature was the consciousness of the revolutionary society; today it is the Party which plays this role. In both cases history, in regard to everything in it that is living, is a history of projects.” (AD 158/213; cf. 157/211) The writer as free agent of the revolution has been replaced by the writer submissive to the Party. Yet, for Merleau-Ponty, the conception of history underpinning both roles is the same: history is what consciousness projects into the future, the work of the cogito, rather than a sedimented past to be grappled with. Sartre's loyalty to the communists, then, is ultimately unmarxist.

Rethinking Literary Engagement Contra Sartre

Building on his 1953 lecture, Merleau-Ponty in Les Aventures de la dialectique reassesses engagement in light of a different understanding of the relationship between consciousness and historical reality. The final twenty pages of the chapter on Sartre (AD 255–71), which form the second excerpt I shall examine, trace how the meaning of engagement evolved between 1945 and 1955, and how it ought to be understood. This shows even more clearly that reflections on the politics of literature ultimately hinge on competing understandings of history.

Merleau-Ponty recalls that in Les Temps modernes they had argued that one cannot rethink the world if one belongs to a party that prescribes a way of seeing it (AD 190/255). This means that, rather than judging reality according to prior systems of thought, one should let one's understanding be reshaped through contact with reality itself. In 1955, however, Merleau-Ponty observes that “something already rendered this program null and void [caduc] and announced the avatars of commitment: it was the manner in which Sartre understood the relation between action and freedom.” (AD 190/255; my italics) I have said above that although the issue of action (as unveiling) has lain at the heart of Sartre's conception of engagement since 1945, according to Merleau-Ponty, he could not but conceptualise it as a matter of individual choice. Rather than affirming the intertwinement of consciousness and historical reality, Sartre's conception of engagement amounts to “the negation of the link between us and the world that it seems to assert; or rather Sartre tries to make a link out of a negation.” (AD 193/260) It is the subject's free decision to act upon the world, rather than recognising that both politics and literature, or action and reflection, are already engaged within historical reality.

One of the avatars of this 1945 conception of engagement that emerged in the early 1950s is Sartre's alignment with communist party politics. For Merleau-Ponty, both conceptions of engagement are grounded in the same faulty metaphysics. As noted earlier in relation to Merleau-Ponty's 1953 letter, he considered that Sartre's notion of engagement failed to distinguish between event and judgement. This, he argued, was the result of Sartre's “constant engagement”—the supposed obligation to speak on every event at the moment it occurs. Although Merleau-Ponty does not retain this term in Les Aventures de la dialectique, the idea resurfaces in his discussion of the link between engagement and history. To be engaged, for Sartre,

is not to interpret and criticize oneself in contact with history; rather it is to recreate one's own relationship with history as if one were in a position to remake oneself from top to bottom, it is to decide to hold as absolute the meaning one invents for one's personal history and for public history (AD 195/262).

Here, once more, two approaches to history are evident. The Sartrean model presents the subject as one who bestows meaning upon history herself. By contrast, Merleau-Ponty proposes that the subject is embedded in historical reality and must continuously interpret and criticise herself. According to de Beauvoir, this may have been true of Sartre's work in the late 1940s when he was still collaborating closely with Merleau-Ponty in founding a union of the non-communist left (the early days of Les Temps modernes), ³¹ but today it is nonsense. She insists that Sartre's alignment with the PCF was precisely the result of his interpreting and criticising himself in contact with history. Recognising that, as an intellectual, he could not change the world, he adopted the form of engagement that his “objective situation” presented as genuine: aligning with the only real power—the proletariat—capable of transforming history. ³²

As de Beauvoir's essay and other contemporary readings of Les Aventures de la dialectique suggest, ³³ Merleau-Ponty misrepresents Sartre's position to some extent. There are quite a few passages in Sartre's work that contradict Merleau-Ponty presentation of Sartre, and also in Sartre's literary writings, such as the novelistic cycle Les Chemins de la liberté (1945–1949) and the plays he was writing at the time, human subjectivity appears as being fully enmeshed in historical reality. However, what interests me more than assessing the validity of his reading is that, in this politically fraught context, the notion of engagement was renegotiated with reference to history: to how one is—or ought to be—engaged in history, and to how literary or philosophical writing should relate to it. This in itself stands as a historical fact that compels reflection. With two political blocs locked in a Cold War, one could apparently no longer engage in the same way as before.

While reading Les Aventures de la dialectique, we are witnesses to the fact that under such historical circumstances, theories were being readdressed. It is precisely this context that leads Merleau-Ponty to insist on a distinction, a gap, between engagement and political action. At the same time, he relies on Sartre's notion of literature as “action as unveiling” to advance this argument. In contrast with politicians, writers must account for the Soviet camps, “for they unveil, their universe is a canvas upon which nothing exists unless it is represented, analyzed, and judged. The newspaper is the truth of the world; it acts by showing.” (AD 177/238) For Merleau-Ponty, genuine writerly engagement differs from politics: it can neither remain silent, nor can it be strategic. It cannot but speak out.

In his 1953 lecture, Merleau-Ponty explicitly refers to Sartre, noting that literature's capacity for unveiling is important because it makes us think (L 350). While this understanding traces back to Sartre's Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, it must be disentangled from the orbit of Sartrean metaphysics and instead framed within the dialectical relationship between consciousness and history. Merleau-Ponty writes that one should not radically distinguish between human beings and things, as Sartre did, but rather recognise that “interworld, which we call history, symbolism, truth-to-be-made.” (AD 200/269) History here is understood as the fabric within which both human beings and objects are enmeshed. It may be termed a symbolism, I suggest, because human beings live—phenomenologically speaking—not in an ‘objective’ or merely ‘empirical’ world, but in a world constituted by forms of expression such as language, images, sedimented meanings, traditions, and rituals. Only by starting from this stratum, Merleau-Ponty argues, one can offer a correct and comprehensive analysis of what genuine engagement entails. After all, Merleau-Ponty observes that action generally “takes place in the intermediate space” between events and thoughts, things and spirits—that is “in the thick stratum of symbolic actions which operate less by their efficacy than by their meaning.” (L 350) This intermediate realm is precisely where writers and intellectuals operate. The action it allows is neither pure nor direct but always symbolic: it unfolds in history understood as the interworld between subjects and objects. In this sense, books as well as lectures can be understood as forms of action as unveiling (AD 201/270).

Framing literary engagement in these terms has a sobering effect. In 1955, Merleau-Ponty calls for an engagement understood as “action at a distance” rather than direct political intervention, presenting it as a mode of positioning oneself in relation to the world, instead of seeking to intervene in it (AD 193/259). He insists on respecting the distinction between engagement and action, as well as between politics and literature. Writers may play an important role, but they should not aspire to intervene directly in politics. Merleau-Ponty stresses that, while linked by “echoes, correspondences, and effects of induction,” the fields of literature and politics are not directly superimposable. They are “two layers of a single symbolic life or history.” (AD 201/271) How this connection operates in practice, however, remains unspecified. Moreover, the account of history as interworld in Les Aventures de la dialectique remains, it must be said, rather vague. One might furthermore ask whether the distinction between politics and literature is primarily ontological or political, philosophical or historical. Merleau-Ponty suggests that the conditions of the time—the ramifications of the Cold War—had torn this symbolic life: since one could not be simultaneously a free writer and a communist, one should not attempt, as Sartre did, to reconcile these positions by force. He therefore concludes that, in order to remain faithful both to literature and to action, at least in 1955, one ought to recognise that they are distinct activities (AD 201/271). The recognition of a gap between literature and politics is thus shaped, at least in part, by contemporaneous geopolitical circumstances.

Conclusion

What, then, can be concluded from this extended examination of Merleau-Ponty's treatment of literature in Les Aventures de la dialectique with regard to the relation between literature and politics? First, it is striking how central this question was at the time. Although Sartre was widely criticised, the problem he posed remained a cornerstone of post-war debates. ³⁴ Artistic and intellectual freedom functioned as a barometer of the political climate, and, while never thematised as the primary concern of Merleau-Ponty's book, the question of literature recurs throughout. For these intellectuals, politics, literature, and history were tightly intertwined, but the nature of that intertwining was a matter of intense debate. For the Temps modernes circle, this constellation was crystallised in the notion of literary engagement, which understands writing both as a mode of acting in the world and as something fully embedded in history. Engagement, in this sense, is not a matter of choice but an ontological condition.

The tensions emerging in the late 1940s and articulated in Les Aventures de la dialectique around the question of literary engagement did not disappear. This moment in post-war French intellectual history is notably situated prior to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, which had a profound impact on communist intellectuals and artists in Western Europe. In that year, Sartre broke off his alignment with the PCF, following its failure to condemn the Soviet military intervention directed against the will of the Hungarian people. It has been argued that both these political developments and Merleau-Ponty's critique of Sartre in Les Aventures de la dialectique contributed to Sartre's rethinking of Marxist philosophy in Questions de méthode (1957) and Critique de la raison dialectique (1960). ³⁵ Ideological alliances were once again reassessed and reconfigured, leading to a renewed and intensified formulation of the question of the relation between politics and literature in the 1960s. ³⁶ Moreover, the question of the politics of form, largely absent from Merleau-Ponty's discussion, would come to occupy centre stage—but that is another story.

Despite Merleau-Ponty's critique of Sartre, their disagreement unfolds within a shared set of assumptions. Literature is conceived as deeply engaged within history and yet capable of transcending it and critically reflecting on it: it is shaped by the socio-historical world while also participating in its formation. The harshness of their debate arguably stems from this common ground. Each accuses the other of failing to provide an adequate philosophical account of the same conviction—of remaining idealist, abstract, or insufficiently historical. The difficulty lies precisely here. Writers are historically engaged, yet the efficacy of their work appears limited. From a twenty-first-century perspective this tension has become even sharper: books may seem politically weak, yet writers continue to be censored and threatened. Literature thus appears both futile and dangerous—powerless in immediate action yet capable of unveiling and therefore of political effect. The relation between literature and politics consequently remains unstable, and neither Sartre nor Merleau-Ponty fully resolves it; their quarrel shows that the history of literary engagement itself is caught within an ambiguous dialectic.