Between Genesis and Generativity

This review essay examines Mariana Larison's Vers une nouvelle phénoménologie de l'institution. Avec et au-delà de Merleau-Ponty, which reconstructs the central role of institution in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological project. Larison traces how Merleau-Ponty's translation of Husserl's Stiftung as Institution opens phenomenology to interdisciplinary dialogue with anthropology, sociology, and legal theory. The book demonstrates how institution operates as a transpersonal and transtemporal structure that challenges ego-centred models of constitution, revealing a plastic organization between actual and habitual dimensions of embodied experience. Through analysis of political, biological, and social dimensions, Larison shows the potentialities of what she terms a phenomenology of institution. The review evaluates Larison's claim that such a phenomenology represents “a third possibility between generativity and genesis,” while noting tensions around the scope of instituted events and the relationship between institution and Merleau-Ponty's later ontological investigations

Intentionality · Phenomenology (philosophy) · Relation (database) · Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre