Abstract

According to Merleau-Ponty, the problem with dialectical materialism from Marx to Trotsky was that it was insufficiently attentive to the inertia of institutions and the real weight of history: it ‘lacked a means of expressing the inertia of the infrastructures, the resistance of economic and even natural conditions, and the swallowing-up of “personal relationships” in “things.”’ In response, Sartre tried to show in his Critique of Dialectical Reason how the world that we create starts to exercise power over us in the form of ‘practico-inert’ structures and institutions. However, these inert institutions do not confront us as passive blocks of objective reality that are simply too difficult to change, as the classic Hegelian notion of social reality as ‘second nature’ would suggest. Instead, they suck us in and suck us dry, absorbing our energies with a kind of vampiric force. Already in Being and Nothingness, Sartre described the way we get enmeshed in material reality like dealing with slime: the more you struggle to free yourself, the more stuck you become. In general, inertia for Sartre is not passive objectivity; rather, we are constantly ‘falling into inertia’. But what is the nature of this inertia, what is the vampiric or ‘slimy’ force of institutions, and how can we resist it? This paper will examine Merleau-Ponty’s claim that Sartre is unable to think inertia, consider whether the theory of the ‘practico-inert’ in the Critique of Dialectical Reason is an adequate response to this concern, and develop the notion of slime (‘le visqueux’) as a ‘middle ground’ between subjectivity and objectivity.