Gianluca De Fazio’s book Avversità e margini di gioco. Studio sulla soggettività in Merleau-Ponty presents precise and original research along several nodes of great importance in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical production, such as subjectivity, expression, passivity, nature, history. By focusing on, without limiting himself to, the 1950’s period, the author declares that he aims at a denaturalization of nature and a dehistoricization of history: an overcoming of dichotomies which, though faithfully following the Merleau-Pontian path, does not fail to have a Deleuzian overtones. (...) The issues of the book are also, and above all, political, shown in the considerations of the task of philosophy. (shrink)

The article proposes to sketch an analogy between, on the one hand, linguistic learning and sound dialogue in humanist music therapy and, on the other hand, certain reflections of Maurice Merleau-Ponty: in particular, the centrality of corporeality in the learning, treated in the Phenomenology of Perception and in the courses on the psychology and pedagogy of the child, and the status of inter-corporeality developed through reflections on passivity and the metaphor of flesh. We will trace an analysis of the music (...) therapy of Giulia Cremaschi Trovesi, with reference to the linguistic and musical gesture, through the Merleau-Pontian notion of praktognosia, and of the sound dialogue with reference to institution and intercorporeity. Through an interpretation of music in the terms adopted by Stéphanie Ménasé and in reference to Merleau-Pontian passivity in artistic creation, our objective is to define the musical institution of the vibrating body in music therapy in terms analogous to the institution of the subject according to Merleau-Ponty and, consequently, to find, in the sound dialogue, the intercorporeity which anticipates the individuation of the subject, by describing the communicative authenticity of the musical-therapeutic encounter. (shrink)

The Russian invasion of 2022 was based on an organized process of influence on the Ukrainian population, aimed at obtaining their support or neutralizing their possible resistance, in concert with the state apparatus. We find, in the backdrop of this process, the memorial conflict between these two countries and their neighbours, concerning World War II and the Soviet Union. This war of influence, or political warfare, which falls within new forms of contemporary hybrid warfare, profoundly has to do with images, (...) especially moving images. The cinematic images, the debauchery of their propaganda during the Second World War and throughout the existence of the USSR, still weighs on the bodies and minds; the new media has in many ways inherented them and their way of reenacting or extending propaganda on an individual or group scale. We will then question the place of images, and in particular those in motion, in the war between Russia and Ukraine since 2014 to describe the way in which they have served or still serve the military-memorial device deployed by the Russian invader. (shrink)

The Russian invasion of 2022 was based on an organized process of influence on the Ukrainian population, aimed at obtaining their support or neutralizing their possible resistance, in concert with the state apparatus. We find, in the backdrop of this process, the memorial conflict between these two countries and their neighbours, concerning World War II and the Soviet Union. This war of influence, or political warfare, which falls within new forms of contemporary hybrid warfare, profoundly has to do with images, (...) especially moving images. The cinematic images, the debauchery of their propaganda during the Second World War and throughout the existence of the USSR, still weighs on the bodies and minds; the new media has in many ways inherented them and their way of reenacting or extending propaganda on an individual or group scale. We will then question the place of images, and in particular those in motion, in the war between Russia and Ukraine since 2014 to describe the way in which they have served or still serve the military-memorial device deployed by the Russian invader. (shrink)

The Russian invasion of 2022 was based on an organized process of influence on the Ukrainian population, aimed at obtaining their support or neutralizing their possible resistance, in concert with the state apparatus. We find, in the backdrop of this process, the memorial conflict between these two countries and their neighbours, concerning World War II and the Soviet Union. This war of influence, or political warfare, which falls within new forms of contemporary hybrid warfare, profoundly has to do with images, (...) especially moving images. The cinematic images, the debauchery of their propaganda during the Second World War and throughout the existence of the USSR, still weighs on the bodies and minds; the new media has in many ways inherented them and their way of reenacting or extending propaganda on an individual or group scale. We will then question the place of images, and in particular those in motion, in the war between Russia and Ukraine since 2014 to describe the way in which they have served or still serve the military-memorial device deployed by the Russian invader. (shrink)

This article proposes a reflection on the meaning of the crisis event that is the war in Ukraine, based on the modes of representation through which it was constituted as an image. Starting from a short essay by Merleau-Ponty written at the end of the Second World War, in which the French philosopher reaffirms that the war took place, I intend to critically juxtapose Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to inherit the crisis as a political task and, above all, a philosophical one, with (...) the processes of hyper-representation highlighted by Jean Baudrillard which, on the contrary, operates a subtraction of the event and the real. The proposal is therefore to analyze the non-taking place of events as the impossibility of inheriting a task and a meaning, by showing how such an impossibility manifests itself precisely in the phenomenal space of our contemporary screens. (shrink)

While Merleau-Ponty’s political positions evolved over the course of his career, they are grounded in and guided by a remarkably consistent account of historicity. Praxis requires authentic historical engagement; and Merleau-Ponty was critical of inauthentic a-historical approaches throughout his career. I chart a trajectory of Merleau-Ponty’s position from The War Has Taken Place (1945), through some of the newly published material from the mid to late 1940’s Michel Dalissier’s monumental two volume collection of inédits, and the Introduction to Signs (1960). (...) This results in two surprising and admittedly controversial observations that contradict dominant narratives. I argue that: (1) Merleau-Ponty’s account of historicity precludes the claim that he abandoned Marxism altogether with the writing of Adventures of the Dialectic (1955); and (2) Merleau-Ponty’s account of historicity reveals the dominant Western narrative about the war in Ukraine to be inauthentic. (shrink)

In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty dedicates many pages to the analysis of pathological cases, which seem to be assessed as merely negative phenomena that reinforce an extrinsic opposition with normal ones. This paper aims to clarify that Merleau-Ponty in effect challenges the able–disabled dichotomy by articulating an intentional analysis based on the perspective of being-in-the-world and proposing a differential understanding of embodiment. Such an analysis demonstrates that ability and disability exist as material and situational events and, simultaneously, form an (...) existential continuum—one that rejects the identification of disability with a disruption (ontological claim) or a degradation (normative claim). (shrink)

Is it possible to conceptualize universality in a way that does not exclude particularity, difference, and change? In his approach to universality, Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between acquired universality, which is supposedly objective and non-temporal, and the lateral differentiation of universals, which is temporal and changing. My suggestion, in this article, is that he does not assert that there is a specific kind of unchanging universal norm to which all different styles of experience should be anchored; instead, there is a never-finished diversification (...) through which universal dimensions are instituted. However, I will also present a critical examination of the concept of change as it can also mean oppressive transformation. Ultimately, Merleau-Ponty’s political view of colonial situation seems to contradict his concept of open universality. (shrink)

The present paper is a review of Critical Studies on Heidegger: The Emerging Body of Understanding (SUNY, 2023), by David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, who argues we can find a phenomenology of perception in Heidegger ultimately no different than that of Merleau-Ponty. The concept of “the emerging body of understanding” means the growth or “perfection” of human capabilities in perception – touch, vision, and hearing – that are attentive to our interconnectedness with others and nature as presented by the Fourfold. The conclusion (...) of the review offers some evaluations regarding questions of influence and recently available course notes by Merleau-Ponty about Heidegger’s philosophy. (shrink)

In this article, I highlight the following points. In 2022, the publication of the two volumes Inédits I (1946-1947) and Inédits II (1947-1949) was a great surprise. Among the many discoveries I made, I will focus here on the reading notes Merleau-Ponty had prepared on Hegel’s Aesthetics. I suggest that the motives of his reading of Hegel’s Aesthetics must be understood according to two aspects, intimately linked: they are first due to the fact that he himself was trying to formulate (...) his own theory of art and aesthetics; and second that he had in mind Sartre’s work What is Literature? I show that, indeed, in his reading of the Aesthetics, Merleau-Ponty very clearly focuses on the distinction between the different genres of art and on their historical divisions. This is a point that leads me to raise the following question: What are the distinctions between artistic genres in Merleau-Ponty? Here, for me it is above all a question of taking into account Merleau-Ponty’s reservations, exposed in his later essay “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” concerning the Sartrean conception of literature which distinguishes poetry from prose. Ultimately, I defend the idea that Merleau-Ponty proposes an experience of art that is inter-genre and inter-media, which opens an indefinite horizon from the historical limitation of art. Based on his theory of language and art, he thus recognized the historicity of language and art, while considering the possibility of transforming this historicity into something open. (shrink)

In contemporary art, a growing number of artists experiment with non-humans in their actual artworks. This paper examines the issues related to such practices with reference to Jakob von Uexküll’s analyses of the configuration of meaningful worlds by non-human animals, as well as Merleau-Ponty’s and Deleuze-Guattari’s interpretations of Uexküll’s ideas. Uexküll maintained that every living being lives in a world with meaning; Merleau-Ponty understood this claim as situating the beginning of culture in the creativity of non-humans; Deleuze and Guattari emphasized (...) the melodic and rhythmic dimension of this creativity, mainly interpreted as territorialization processes. These elements are paramount to understanding what is at stake with artworks featuring non-humans: considering projects proposals from Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Tomas Saraceno, Ana Maria Lopez Gomez and other contemporary artists, the conclusion is that an artwork featuring an encounter between two territorializing movements has the potential to transform the human range of perception. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty’s article, “La guerre a eu lieu”, contains, as has been said, a kind of new phenomenology of perception. Its research question could be formulated as follows. What prevented German-occupied France from perceiving the enemy as an enemy for so many months or years of alienating cohabitation? The “drôle de guerre” would, among other things, be linked to this singular perceptual impasse. An impasse that is as dramatic as instructive, since it shows that war and politics have nothing to do (...) with handling the friend/enemy dialectical opposition Carl Schmitt situated at the center of his philosophy. Rather, they have to do with handling an adialectical field in which that opposition is not yet delineated and perceptible, but is rather evolving in a continuity and ambiguity that constitute the real (and in this sense immoral) matter of politics and war. (shrink)

Petri Berndtson’s Phenomenological Ontology of Breathing points to the largely unexplored dimension of our being breathing beings. Berndtson draws upon the ontology of the flesh, as well as several comments of Merleau-Ponty about breathing and Being. The primordial perceptual faith in the being of the world as a field of all fields (the “barbaric conviction”) is seen as a primordial sense of breathing in the world (“respiratory faith”). Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s reference to Claudel’s call to listen to the ear of (...) Sigé, the Abyss, Berndtson relates silence in the encounter with Being to an encounter with silence of breath and its abyssal or chasmological (“yawning”) quality. He asserts that this level of breathing is a level of being-in-the-world deeper than the primacy of perception. At this point, the review questions the author’s assertion that this dimension is more primordial than perception, that Merleau-Ponty has a positivistic framing of perception, the author’s literal sense of silence and the lack of appreciation of the power of the poetic in flesh ontology, the role of reversibility and the import of the invisible of the visible. Rather than the ontological primacy of breath, the review suggests that breathing is a way of taking in the world and being open to an aerial dimension of inchoate sense that is equiprimordial with the other avenues of perceiving the world. (shrink)

This text is based on a reflection on the context and meaning of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s visit to Mexico in February-March 1949 and the lectures he gave at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). I rely on the information, analysis and notes of Merleau-Ponty that Michel Dalissier offers us in his book Inédits I-II. I devote myself particularly to commenting on the cultural experience that this trip represented for Merleau-Ponty – his relationship with (...) the Mexican philosophy of the Hiperión group – as well as his conception of culture and the relationship between cultures that he exhibits at the time and in the general construction of his own work and philosophy. I support the thesis that the question of a plurality of cultures and interculturality can only be thought in a rigorous way – without falling into cultural relativism or an abstract universalism – through a phenomenological-existential reformulation of the « universal, » as Merleau-Ponty outlines it in the Mexico Conferences. (shrink)

The two series of correspondence between Simone de Beauvoir with both Élisabeth Lacoin (Zaza) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty – published in the volume Lettres d’amitié (Gallimard, 2022) – represent an essential contribution for several reasons. First, these letters offer the possibility of considering the friendship between Beauvoir and Lacoin; then, they also allow us to understand the essential role of Zaza in the development of Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophical and literary project. Finally, these letters also let us know Beauvoir’s attitude during (...) a particular moment in her life that is to say the period when, while she was taking philosophy courses at the Sorbonne, she began to feel the need to write literature, which she discusses with Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

Staging, writing, editing – war. In the sequence of these three acts, the path of this essay unfolds. From the play La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu we get the idea that war is a spectral presence hovering everywhere. As difficult as it is to see, it appears inescapable. Its ambivalence questions the human gaze itself in its in-ability to see war coming, even when the signs are more than evident. The analysis of the regimes of visibility that, yesterday (...) as today, superintend the event of a conflict constitutes the point of arrival of this interrogation. (shrink)

The essay intends to revisit certain phenomenological themes present in the theoretical work of Pierre Schaeffer, based on his most important and influential book: the Traité des objets musicaux. A French engineer and composer, Schaeffer was the initiator – from the point of view of its musical practice, and its theoretical analysis – of one of the most important musical avant-gardes of the 20th century, musique concrète. The objective of the article will be to consider Schaeffer’s main reference – the (...) phenomenology of Edmund Husserl – and suggest that Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology could be a prism that helps to understand and expand the heterogeneous and incomplete research project the French composer documented extensively in his writings. (shrink)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) discusses the living body through the concept of intentionality. Later, Merleau-Ponty comes up with a theory of ontology based on the reversibility of the flesh. Zhuangzi (375-300 BCE) also speaks of the significant role played by our bodies in shaping our knowledge and experience. However, Zhuangzi relates the body to yi 意presented, referring to the creative coordination of bodily organs of perception and movement 眼-手-伸-通(such as eyes and hands), developed by constantly and persistently engaging with an object. (...) The presence of yi dictates a manifestation of walking-where-all-things-have-been-walking which is Dao. (shrink)