The book Identité et primauté d’autrui presents a study of intersubjectivity in Merleau-Ponty. Subjectivity emerges against a background of a world shared with the other, a human world, and is preceded by its relationship to the other. The assumption of the primary character of this relationship takes on the shape of hospitality. Such a politics of hospitality is opposed to state politics aiming for cultural security and the defense of values, taking their origins in neoconservatism and notably deployed against immigration and mixity. This original study of hospitality, departing from Merleau-Ponty in an original manner while remaining anchored in the Phenomenology of Perception, offers a response to the need to protect an unavoidable ontological pluralism.

In Opacidad y relativismo. La situacionalidad del conocimiento en tensión entre Merleau-Ponty y Foucault, Claudio Cormick introduces Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s and Michel Foucault’s philosophies as attempts to face two possible obstacles for human knowledge : on the one hand, the opacity of consciousness with regard to the foundations of its own positions; on the other, the relative, non-absolute character of our claims to truth, inasmuch as they are formulated within concrete social and historical conditions.

In this text, my aim is to provide a reading of Mauro Carbone’s Philosophy Screens: From Cinema to the Digital Revolution in the context of his other writings. My claim is that in this most recent work, Carbone makes a decisive step from being an original interpreter of the work of Merleau-Ponty and Proust to making an original contribution to what I describe, following Merleau-Ponty and Carbone, the history of “a-philosophy”: an historical attempt to reverse the “official philosophy” that has been with us since at least Plato. This reversal is staged through a series of concepts, created by Carbone, that I take up here viz à viz Plato’s allegory of the cave: the archescreen, the sensible idea, the screen, and philosophy-cinema (a concept borrowed from Deleuze). Together, these concepts illustrate what I call, borrowing a phrase from Jean-Luc Nancy, a philosophical partance: for Carbone, the work of “philosophizing” should no longer be conceptualized in accordance with Platonic imagery of ascent, illumination, conversion, and importantly, grasping and seizing upon the είδη but as “departure”: allowing the objects of thought their transcendence, a liquidity by which they slip through our grasp.

This interview with David Kleinberg-Levin, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University, concerns his recent trilogy on the promise of happiness in literary language. Kleinberg-Levin discusses the relationship between and among philosophy, phenomenology, and literature. Among others, he addresses questions regarding literature’s ability to offer redemption, its response to suffering and justice, literary gesture, the ethics of narrative logic, and the surface of the text.

The whole path of Merleau-Ponty’s thought is crossed – some times more evidently than others – by what I propose to qualify as the idea of literature and philosophy as visual apparatuses (dispositifs), to use an expression that was born – and not by chance – in the field of Film Studies. More precisely, I aim at asserting that Merleau-Ponty sees literature and philosophy working in his epoch as convergent apparatuses of vision, in turn understood as a bodily and not merely ocular practice. Immediately after that, I should specify that such convergent visual apparatuses peculiarly function by words, and that Merleau-Ponty stresses their different efficiency in expressing his epoch. Moreover, I think that the implicit idea of philosophy as a visual apparatus working by words “like all literature” has a particularly relevant but so far not consequently developed place in in the last period of Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Also, I would like to stress that such a perspective is crucial in our own time too, even though I consider it to be different from Merleau-Ponty’s. Indeed, I think that both our time and Merleau-Ponty’s are characterized by a tension between the increasing importance of images and the traditional centrality of the concept in our culture.

This paper investigates the role of literature and, in particular, Proust in Merleau-Ponty’s late works’ rehabilitation of the ontology of the sensible. First, I trace Proust’s role in Phenomenology of Percpetion, contrasting it with the somewhat more paradigmatic status as a model it plays in the late works. Second, I compare this with the role of the novel as partial myth in Schelling, who also played an essential role in Merleau-Ponty’s refiguration of the sensible. I briefly trace his examination of the historical or “sociological meaning” of literature through works of the fifties, beginning with his Collège de France candidacy proposal and continuing through his examination of the rationality of modern disenchantment (Entzauberung) or dépoétization in the Adventures of the Dialectic. Finally, discussing the late analysis of Proust against this backdrop, I conclude with considerations concerning the relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s overall analysis of Proust both in his thought and contemporary literary criticism and philosophy more generally.

This article examines the place of literature in the ensemble of Merleau-Ponty’s research, comparing the function it fills in the economy of his thought to the role other practices and other disciplines such as biology and psychology play in his philosophy. Each of these “discourses” offered Merleau-Ponty access to something comparable to a common phantasmatic substance, a common metaphorical stability of Being, that the biologist, the writer, and the psychoanalyst work on, each in their own writings and categories. But here emerges also a major question. To what extent does the language of Proust reveal itself up to the task of writing the phantasm, to what extent does it respond to this challenge? In what manner are the limits of his language, which are perhaps the limits of language itself, an obstacle to his project? And what is it that permits, at times, the sciences to obtain greater success in engaging in this way? Was it precisely the structure of metaphor that hindered Proust in truly writing encroachment, and the dimension of metonymy was, on the contrary, that in which a certain scientific discourse succeeded at setting itself up on the first try? If, finally and especially, metonymy was the very heart of metaphor, with more or less success touched by one or the other of the “regional” writings of the phantasm?

The commentary Merleau-Ponty offers in 1960 on Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry gives a privileged place to language, to writing: it is perhaps a great astonishment to see Merleau-Ponty, in continuity with Husserl, thinking about the genesis of geometrical ideality beginning from a meditation on literature. Merleau-Ponty’s reflection on literature took a decisive ontological turn at the beginning of the 1950s, notably in the long commentary on Proust in 1953-1954. It is in this spirit that the course of 1960 grants to literature an ontological sense: the ideality of geometry can occur as ideality by the passage to speech and to writing, but the meaning of even scientific ideality can be understood only if one places it on the basis of more fundamental idealities that literature precisely reveals, idealities that are linked across time, in the connection between past and present, self and other. Literature clarifies the history of geometry in yet another manner: it brings to light the intertwining of human-language-world, condition of the emergence of a true sense, which occurs in the history of geometry, and which literature, assuming our being in speech bears more fundamentally still.