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in)—however, are usually presented in oppositional terms, as if intervention and interrogation, action and thinking, were mutually exclusive human practices, as if there were no thinking in action and no interrogation in intervention or no agency in thought and no intervention when we interrogate—in brief, as if there were no active component in the passivity of interrogative thinking and no passive sensibility in the activity of intervention. If instead of opposing action and thought, or participating and witnessing, we consider the reversibility of them, then intervention and interrogation become ideal-typical poles of a continuum rather than incompatible opposites—and the pseudo-objectivity of knowing (science), an objectivity that usually expects to ultimately put to rest the uncertainties, disagreements, and hesitations of action and interrogation, will then become another contestable approach to the political, one that both informs and keeps in check the rather more freewheeling propensities of intervention and interrogation. All this said, however, and although it is unambiguous that aesthetico-political writing generates all three forms of political writing—it (directly or indirectly) intervenes in the conflicts of its time, it describes explicitly political events, and it interrogates the question of the institution of society—it is the latter that I think it does in a way that makes the most permanent contributions to the question of the political. In order to further explore this idea, let me now briefly borrow from French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In one of his most insightful aesthetic essays—“Cézanne’s Doubt”—Merleau-Ponty presented painter Paul Cézanne as a phenomenologist of the visible and of vision—and then, in “Eye and Mind,” he offered a similar account of Paul Klee. According to Merleau-Ponty, in his painting, Cézanne posed the following questions: What does it mean for the world to be visible? What does it mean for there to be vision? What does it mean to see? The painter interrogates the enigma of vision (this sort of madness, as Merleau-Ponty put it, in which I am where I am not and in which I can touch-at-a-distance) and of visibility. The enigma of vision is indeed the enigma of having-at-a-distance and that of a seer who belongs to the seen, being him or herself visible themselves. In this dialectic of the seer and the visible in which both see and are seen, the visible looks at the painter too, like the mirror, and like the body, that sees-itself-seeing. Painting, the visual arts in general, thus interrogate the visible. What do writing, theory or even art, when it is fundamentally conceptual, interrogate? Writing, theory and conceptual art interrogate the invisible.
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In his unfinished The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty reinitiated the gesture—a gesture he had been attempting since his early The Structure of Behavior and his massive Phenomenology of Perception—of dismantling the mind/body, essence/appearance dichotomies so dominant in Western philosophy. In the later work, this gesture was finding a more precise formulation—only to be interrupted by his sudden death at age 53. We thus know that the actually said was not all that was about to be said; that, we almost physically perceive while reading his manuscript. The said, however, nonetheless captured the movement of the saying, and in doing so it managed to put forward the following insight: the invisible—the ideas, the activity of our thinking, our ability to sometimes co-think, at the same time (or at a different time) by two different bodies—all these forms of invisibility are not of a different order than that of the visible; the invisible is not another world, somehow paradoxically located elsewhere and nowhere at the same time. The invisible is the invisible of the visible (or of “visibles”); it is its “offspring,” as it were, its emanation. The invisible is the invisible of the visible and has no other location than that of events and phenomena, that of the “things themselves,” that of the flesh of the world and the flesh of things. If the body—that self-animated being that moves things and moves itself—is made of flesh, then the extension of the body that is its sound, its language, is the incursion of the visible flesh into the invisible—now itself become flesh. The flesh of language, that self-animated being that moves things and moves itself, is thus the body of the invisible—the ideas, the activity of our thinking, our ability to sometimes co-think, at the same time (or at a different time) by two different bodies—and this is what the writer, the theorist, and the conceptual artist interrogate. And it is in this sense that the contributions to this volume fundamentally interrogate the political—that is, not exclusively as texts that intervene in the visible conflicts of our time (although this they do, mostly in a nuanced, indirect way) or texts that describe visible political processes of times past or present (although this they do too, with quite ludic and insightful results), but texts that interrogate the enigma of society’s self-institution, the enigma at the center of political thought and political philosophy in their dealing with the invisible of the visible, with the meaning of what appears, disappears or reappears in collective life.