The objective of this article is to study the effects produced by Merleau-Ponty in Marxism. Through our reading of “The Proletarian Experience”, a text published by Claude Lefort in the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, we show that the arguments of Merleau-Ponty against Marxism have paradoxically allowed certain fringes of the labor movement to invent a new style of doing politics. Our thesis is that the practice of militant inquiry thematized by Lefort in “The Proletarian Experience” constitutes at the same time an original inheritance of Merleau-Pontian phenomenology and the primary means to a renewal of emancipatory politics.
