L’exigence politique: l’humanitas selon Merleau-Ponty, d’Humanisme et terreur aux Aventures de la dialectique

This essay analyzes the theme of humanitas in Merleau-Ponty, starting from the refl ections worked out by the French philosopher in Humanism and Terror up to the considerations of his work dated 1955, Adventures of the Dialectic. In this work, in fact, the initial membership to the PCF turns into the search for a “third power”, that Merleau-Ponty extrapolate from Marx’s early writings. The fact that he moved away from the fi gure Sartre in those years characterizes Merleau- Ponty’s new dialectics, and the new conception of history and politics towards a research that increasingly aims at ontology