This paper considers two claims Merleau-Ponty makes about about institution very early on in his course: that it is a “symbolic matrix”; and that it is “not the opposite of revolution.” The first claim is psychoanalytically oriented. It suggests that subjectivity is internally structured by what resists it (Merleau-Ponty makes this claim in the context of cathexis and animal instincts) and that this resistance is nonetheless operant. The second claim is historical and political. The past internally structures the present and is operant within it, but this past is not something to which we can return—it is not an original moment—so much as it continually opens the present to its otherwise latent meanings. I want to show the inherent connection between these personal and public institutions in Merleau-Ponty by stressing the logic of power at play in both, or what Merleau-Ponty calls the “problem of power.” That is the resistant element to both the levels the particular and the general, which Merleau-Ponty, I think, highlights in his unique notion of institution. The last section of this paper contrasts a resulting notion of violence in institution to the one that Fanon outlines.