Abstract (EN)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is a major phenomenologist and philosopher of the 20th century. From his two seminal books Structure and Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception till his last unfinished opus The Visible and the Invisible, he moved from a phenomenology to what he called his ‘indirect’ or ‘sensible ontology’. This chapter details what was his first phenomenological thought before exploring his indirect ontology as interwoven with a broader ‘metaphysics of history’. Surprisingly, this metaphysics of history appears as very close to the thought of the last, ethical Foucault. It offers a very interesting temporal view of the relationship between the present and actuality, and productive differences at stake in historical processes.