SubStance #142, Vol. 46, no. 1, 2017 69 Politics and Commonality of Sensation From a Reading of Merleau-Ponty Razvan Amironesei & Louis-Étienne Pigeon 1 Introduction During the afternoon of December 21, 1989, in Bucharest, a mass of demonstrators gather in a public square (later called The Revolution Square) at the request of Nicolae Ceausescu, then president of Romania. In the previous days, students had shaken the country by taking to the streets in protest in the city of Timisoara. These mass protests had been preceded that year by a wave of other social movements that took place in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. Now in a broadcast from the balcony of the square, Ceausescu tries to reassure the population while making distressed appeals to preserve the unity of the political regime in the country. In the front row of the assembled crowd, a group of individuals cheer up the leader for the cameras while a silent majority listens quietly. Moments later, during the speech, the mood of the people gathered in the square changes dramatically. The small minority of individuals who were actively supporting the president is submerged by a growing expression of discontent. Something had happened. Ceausescu’s speech is stopped short by loud noises and screams. People start to move in the square and dismantle the line of security forces that were cordon- ing the event. From that crucial moment, the Romanian revolution had begun… Later it was speculated that the loud noises were initiated by a woman who in an expression of anger apparently lashed out a scream of despair followed by the word “Dictator!” This is not all. It seems that the screams were tape-recorded and delivered at the opportune moment as an efcient political device by the opposition forces assembled in the square in order to spark and mobilize a political protest during Ceausescu’s speech. In this paper, we will not discuss revolutionary events in Europe or elsewhere. Rather, we will use the above event as a concrete exemplar— the symptom of a problem that enables and orients the relation between sensation, politics and the body. In addition, the above example will constitute a thought experiment that will allow us to test our hypothesis © Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2017 click here to access the entire “ assemblages ” issue