Status Updates From Adventures of the Dialectic...

I definitely feel that this will be a book to reread, for while one can simply say that it has been critiquing Sartre's (and other parts of Les Temps Modernes) stance on the USSR, the angle which he has come at it was unexpected. There is almost a precursor to Derrida in here, "It is essential for peace that communism stop being this ghost floating somewhere between transcendental freedom and everyday prose,..."

It seems that Merleau-Ponty, while tracing the dialectic through its "adventure" through the revolution which lead to the USSR through Lukács, Lenin, and Trotsky he is also seems to be asserting that there has been an unexamined dialectical contradiction between the proletariat and the revolutionary party.

What Merleau-Ponty seems to do well is address the problem of raising the consciousness of the proletariat and doing it in such a manner that he address the proletariats status as subject and trying to find their object in the Hegelian manner. History and nature there is a problem of how the dialectic works on both while they are both constantly becoming. He doesn't use qualitative difference, but it seems a problem.