Actuating Phenomenology, virtue ethics and art to prefigure a grace-filled politics

This talk draws primarily on Merleau-Pontean phenomenology and theology and contributes to research in the area of non-oppositional, post-oppositional, and prefigurative politics by exploring the notion of a "grace-filled" politics.

I begin by examining the ways in which the movement and workings of grace have been characterised and raise some general problems that a grace-filled politics would need to address. Notably, the problem of "the enemy." I then consider what I take to be profoundly grace-filled aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, and what might be learned from them, even though—as far as I am aware—‘grace’ is not a term that features in his writing. To this end, I reflect on key aspects of a transcribed interview from 1958 titled ‘On Madagascar’. I chose this text for three reasons. First, it addresses issues of extreme urgency and difficulty that arose as mid-twentieth-century French colonial politics and African autonomist movements confronted one another. Secondly, it demonstrates the workings of Merleau-Ponty’s non-dual, perceptually grounded thought at work within this environment, leading to nuanced analyses which he insists, nonetheless, can only offer partial truths. Thirdly, the interview, as a record of lived thought in process, also contains assertions which, then as now, have provoked not only critique but also censure. The text itself is a contested zone, and I haven’t found it easy to engage with it. But as such, it has also offered me, as reader, the opportunity to approach it with precisely the grace-filled perceptual and interpretative orientations that I claim also to discover within it.