A weak and equivocal sign, raised to the rank of a central conceptual scheme in the philosophies of Levinas and Derrida, the notion of trace appears in an allusive but insistent way in Merleau-Ponty's writings devoted to speech and writing. Traces challenge the hegemonic omnipotence of the sign; they both conjure up the mundane contextuality of speech and the lacunar dimension of the expression of meaning, beyond any phenomenal presence and any presentive intuition. Through Husserlian phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty examines the essential (...) character of writing in the constitution of corporeality, otherness, intersubjectivity, and historicity: graphic signs, thought of as traces and the “experience of an absent”, acquire a dimension of material ideality of a new kind, at the limits of phenomenology. (shrink)

What does it mean to leave a trace for posterity? How can the traces of the past, reified in the writing of a story, become works and form a world? In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt envisions of narrativity as a condition of possibility of History: freed from historicism, historiography, far from appearing as a positive knowledge recording the marks of a vanished past, has the function of revealing phenomenologically the meaning of the historical actions of speaking beings in works (...) taking the form of a narrative. The husserlian problem of the worldly transmission of the idealities of the past in a writing released from subjective memory is thus reinterpreted in the light of an analysis of political action reconfigured in a narration: it is through the mediation of a story shaping the traces of the past that human beings can retrospectively have access to a non-past history. (shrink)