Simultaneity and duration: time and history in Merleau-Ponty

The present research aims to investigate the relationship between time and history in Merleau- Ponty\'s last philosophy. Beginning with the texts and lessons of the first half of the 1950s, we believe that there is a first explicit thematization by the phenomenologist of the problem of thinking, on the one hand, the philosophical status of a universal history and, on the other hand, a temporality that is properly historical Such thematization occurs, according to our working hypothesis, when Merleau-Ponty begins to undertake a progressive \"desubjectivation\" of time and to question some ontological difficulties in which his philosophy has become entangled. The central aspect of this change of perspective, it seems to us, is the multifaceted debate that our author is struggling with relativism in this period, as what is at stake in this debate is the possibility of rethinking the idea of universality without, however, make it external to singularity. It is in this context that a new conception of history and its temporality begins to be formulated, culminating in the detailed elaboration of the notion of institution. From there, we find the first unfolding of this notion in the Merleau-Pontian interrogation of dialectics, because a thorough understanding of the idea of mediation will make it possible to think of internal relations between universality and singularity, as well as a historical and temporal movement of totalization. Thus, it becomes possible to understand the place and importance of these problems within the merleau-pontian ontological project, whose better expression appears in his later texts. In this field, the problems of time and history, considered by the thread of the problem of relativism, may receive an appropriate philosophical treatment - for here the Being itself becomes thought in its temporality and historicity, as a movement of self-differentiation that allows understanding archaeological articulation between nature and history, articulation that involves both continuity and discontinuity between the two terms. (AU)