Der rote Faden

Not only in his now largely forgotten texts on the Communist Party, the Moscow Trials, the camp system in the Soviet Union, the situation of the French colonies, and many other aspects of his time, but throughout his entire extensive work, Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed a delicate 'politics of perception.' Oliver Precht explains the development and polyphony of his work along central thoughts and concepts, demonstrating its inseparable entanglement with the history of nature, politics, and thought. The book takes this fundamental historical-political situatedness of Merleau-Ponty's thinking as its starting point and shows that despite—or rather precisely because of—this entanglement with his own time, it offers insights for the present. As a comprehensive portrait of this 'thinker of entanglement,' The Red Thread illustrates how Merleau-Ponty's radically non-dogmatic, existentialist Marxism lays the philosophical foundations for a leftist politics that does not lose its thread even in the age of the Anthropocene. The book is complemented by a stunning text by Merleau-Ponty, translated here for the first time, which was originally intended for his unfinished late major work, The Visible and the Invisible.