The purpose of this article is to reconstruct the philosophical and political significance of a meaningful love analogy that Merleau-Ponty establishes between a certain way of understanding history and the institution of a feeling of love: just as all love takes place through an encounter and is the expression of a sensitive idea and the reactivation of a tradition, which may certainly be motivated by the individual’s past but which each time carries with it more than it originally promised, so politics must be understood as the capacity to create meaning, to overwrite the sedimented past. In doing so, we will analyse the concept of the institution as a fundamental mode of time – a particular way of inhabiting time – in order to draw from it a lesson about hi story and politics. Politics will then emerge as the theatre of contingency, and Merleau-Ponty’s reflections will be seen to shape not so much a philosophy of history as a philosophy of freedom and contingency.
