Politics and Commonality of Sensation from a Reading of Merleau-Ponty

Introduction

During the afternoon of December 21, 1989, in Bucharest, a mass of demonstrators gather in a public square (later called The Revolution Square) at the request of Nicolae Ceausescu, then president of Romania. In the previous days, students had shaken the country by taking to the streets in protest in the city of Timisoara. These mass protests had been preceded that year by a wave of other social movements that took place in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. Now in a broadcast from the balcony of the square, Ceausescu tries to reassure the population while making distressed appeals to preserve the unity of the political regime in the country. In the front row of the assembled crowd, a group of individuals cheer up the leader for the cameras while a silent majority listens quietly. Moments later, during the speech, the mood of the people gathered in the square changes dramatically. The small minority of individuals who were actively supporting the president is submerged by a growing expression of discontent. Something had happened. Ceausescu’s speech is stopped short by loud noises and screams. People start to move in the square and dismantle the line of security forces that were cordoning the event. From that crucial moment, the Romanian revolution had begun… Later it was speculated that the loud noises were initiated by a woman who in an expression of anger apparently lashed out a scream of despair followed by the word “Dictator!” This is not all. It seems that the screams were tape-recorded and delivered at the opportune moment as an efficient political device by the opposition forces assembled in the square in order to spark and mobilize a political protest during Ceausescu’s speech.

In this paper, we will not discuss revolutionary events in Europe or elsewhere. Rather, we will use the above event as a concrete exemplar—the symptom of a problem that enables and orients the relation between sensation, politics and the body. In addition, the above example will constitute a thought experiment that will allow us to test our hypothesis that links the assemblage of bodies, screams, noises, and their collective formation at the intersection of politics and sensation. For now, suffice to say that from this example, the screams in question have the effect to actually galvanize the mass of protesters and allow for a coagulation of the political discontent that eventually extends to the whole country in the following days. As will become clear in what follows, our line of interpretation is that the act of “screaming” works in this context as the locus of sensation that had a generative function on the mass of people gathered in the square and eventually generated a political event.

The philosophical challenge we wish to address here is to explore the conditions for the emergence of a political phenomenology of the body. Our objective is to establish a phenomenological constitution of a collective body and its relation to the political dimension of sensation from Merleau-Ponty’s book Phenomenology of Perception (1945).² In particular, the concepts of body and sensation present in this book will help us frame this problem. One must note that, from a methodological point of view, while our treatment of the political relation between body and sensation from Phenomenology of Perception is in line with feminist readings on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment (Kruks; Butler; Olkowski & Weiss; Weiss; Coole), such a philosophical enterprise³ is not deemed compatible with our classical conception of political experience,⁴ including with Merleau-Ponty’s own assertions, which place politics within the horizon of Marxism.

For this paper, the concept of “existential politics” (Whiteside) describes best Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to the domain of politics. This concept refers to the freedom⁵ to be engaged in different projects that define human essence; it is “the sole means of gaining access [to the world], of knowing, and doing something” (qtd. in Whiteside 38). Existence is understood here as the particular bodily engagement in a physical and social situation which...