This article approaches the political mythology of authority through an interpretation of Kojève’s reading of authority. The deployment of discourses directed at the creation of common meanings arises as the central vector of authority, shared temporalities being the foremost among them. At a time of the presence of authority´s absence the master narratives that aim at bringing together that which remains apart cannot be recognized as unified. What remains as the realm of commonality is the very absence of authority.

This paper connects Merleau-Ponty’s conception of chiasm with his philosophy of history. I argue that history gives us an exemplary form of a chiastic relation and that Merleau-Ponty presages his later ontology of flesh when he investigates the paradox of thinking history. In brief, the paradox is this: history takes on significance only in light of a given reflection on it (just as the world is disclosed only by means of a given body). At the same time, “the given reflection” is overlaid and shot through with historical meaning and is nothing but the result of a historical inheritance (just as the body is bound up with the world and is nothing apart from it). I claim that, for Merleau-Ponty, to think history is to think that which is external to oneself and that which one is, in a deferred simultaneity or “circularity” that can be called chiastic.