No completed history, no “philosophie de survol”, no detached philosophy, but rather a militant philosophy, one that works and acts in the world, that adheres to things and situations, that establishes relations, connections, openings, meaning. This is the French philosopher’s project from his earliest works; this is, as he himself writes in the essay Notes on Machiavelli, “the center of philosophy”2. If militant philosophy is what Merleau-Ponty recognizes in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit – see the essay entitled Hegel’s Existentialism3 – then, already at this early stage, we can clearly understand what is at stake in the task he assigns to thought: to uncover the radicality and the originary sources of institutions as a permanent counter-power. In direct confrontation with events – or rather, with the occurrences of history – Merleau-Ponty addresses the delicate question of philosophical and political engagement. If philosophy and politics separate or break our inherence in the world, our sense of dwelling within it, then the failure of both is close at hand.