War’s arbitrary cruelty shaped Merleau-Ponty’s later emphasis on embodiment

Evidence

Merleau-Ponty was posted as an infantry officer to Longwy on the front line. He later recalled one long night during which he and his unit listened to the calls for help of a German lieutenant who had been shot and was stuck in the barbed wire: ‘French soldiers, come get a dying man.’ They had orders not to go to him, as the cries could have been a ploy, but the next day they found him dead on the wire. Merleau-Ponty would never forget the sight of ‘the narrow chest which the uniform barely covered in that near-zero cold … the ash-blond hair, the delicate hands’. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 454

Categorization

• XREF: This traumatic scene anticipates Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body and perception — the flesh-and-blood reality behind the abstractions of being-in-the-world. — connects to: The Korean War and Soviet camp revelations reversed Merleau-Ponty and Sartre’s relative Communist sympathies — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 802; Beauvoir’s concept of sexual difference derives from Merleau-Ponty, not Sartre. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 399
• FICTION: The detail of the dying lieutenant stuck in barbed wire, with orders not to rescue him, is a ready-made scene of moral and sensory extremity.