In this paper, I outline some key epistemic premises for a critical phenomenology of gestational experience, working through the analysis of pregnant embodiment in Merleau-Ponty’s Psychologie et pédagogie de l’enfant. The first part of my paper introduces Merleau-Ponty’s anti-essentialist position; in the second part, I focus on pregnant embodiment, and I highlight Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the gestating subject as a self in the world and of the gestational body as lived body. In the third and final part, I suggest how critical phenomenology might account philosophically for the situated experience of the gestating self by considering the intersection of pregnancy and disability as a case study. These findings may suggest a path for fruitful further analysis of pregnant lived experience, taking into account the axes of oppression and marginalisation which shape one’s subjectivity.

In this text we try to develop some considerations starting from the readings that Jacques Garelli elaborates through a profound reflection on the theses expounded by Merleau-Ponty in his latest works. In particular we, after recalling some points of contact between the two thinkers, comment on two long essays by Jacques Garelli dedicated to Rimbaud and Artaud. Through these re-readings we aim to highlight the novel characteristics that the author of Rythmes et mondes has managed to outline through an ever-greater study of the theses on language presented by Merleau-Ponty in his latest works.

This article retraces the main instances at the root of Merleau-Ponty’s project of a « transcendental geology », a project announced in a working note of 1960. This project is linked to the complex intertwining of history and nature, which Merleau-Ponty thematizes as the two non-objectifiable dimensions that pose a challenge to reflexive thought. History and nature, both in their particular subjective manifestations as personal life or one’s own body, as well as in their broader sense as the history of peoples or nature as a domain of the unbuilt, are characterized as unavoidable, as quasi-objects that are the soil of existence. It is in this direction that Merleau-Ponty’s interest in the “ultra-things” of Henri Wallon, those entities that the child can neither conceive nor imagine, seems to be heading. I propose that ultra-things are linked to inhabiting: they are the uninhabitable (the past before my birth, a distant planet) and the dimensions that cannot be renounced (one’s own body, the Earth, the story of my life). This relationship with inhabiting restores the relational aspect of the problem of the unreflective in Merleau-Ponty and highlights the timeliness and urgency of the program of a transcendental geology as an ecology of thought and as an ecological philosophy.

The emergence of ecology as a fundamental horizon not only of politics, but also of contemporary philosophy, pushes us to rethink the relationship that currents of thought such as Kuturkritik and phenomenology, especially the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, can maintain with it. After a preliminary consideration of post-structuralist and postmodern positions from this perspective, the essay focuses on the French philosopher, and in particular on his courses on Nature and on his elaboration of the Husserlian concept of Stiftung. This results in Merleau-Ponty’s original position on the Kultur – Civilization alternative: critique of unlimited productivism, respect for the environment, and, at the same time, defense of the variety of cultures and traditions from a homogenizing globalization are valuable tools that his philosophy offers to the debates of our time.

Beginning with the relation between the question of Nature and the status of philosophy, this essay interprets the theme of the mirror through the chiasm between multiplicity and thought. This relation is not substantial dualism’s relation of the subject with the object, but rather, following the image used by Merleau-Ponty, it is like the relation between two mirrors facing each other, thus suggesting that the “subject” herself is a multiplicity. From thence, drawing inspiration from this quote in Eye and Mind, “the Cartesian does not see himself in the mirror”, I formulate both the problem of the body and the question of intersubjectivity as a field of individuation for all possible forms of subjectivity. Following this theme, the essay retraces the use of the mirror in the Note on Machiavelli. Finally, given that the theme of subjectivity as a multiplicity is related to the theme of corporeality (granting the principle of reversibility characteristic of a Merleau-Pontian ontology), the essay ends with an analysis of the idea of the body-mirror (and not simply the “body in the mirror”) which, from an intersubjective point of view, becomes an expressive relation in which each body is mirror and expression of the whole universe, thus unlocking an existential monadology.

This essay builds on two questions: the relation of the child with the other and the child’s way of knowing, in which the resistance of the unreflected is not yet problematized. Through a reconstruction of Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Piaget’s idea of the child’s linear intellectual progression toward reflexive abstraction, I highlight the moment of unreflection by taking up the notion of ultra-thing, which Merleau-Ponty borrows from Henry Wallon. These ultra-things are entities with which the child entertains a vague relation and which always remain at the horizon of her perception without yet being possessed in a representation or grasped in a concept. They include, for example, the sun, the sky, the Earth, the body as an object, existence before the birth of the child – uninhabitable dimensions or, to the contrary, ones that are necessarily inhabited. The concept of ultra-thing has not been sufficiently explored in Merleau-Pontian studies and its importance remains underappreciated. This essay thus formulates a hypothesis about the relation between ultra-things and hyper-reflection.

This essay investigates the question of the birth of the subject through Lacan’s and Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the function of the mirror, specularity, and the speculative. The first section draws on the “duplication” of self-consciousness described by Hegel in the first pages of Phenomenology of Spirit. The question of the double and the mirror is then examined through the three main versions of Lacan’s mirror stage, interpreted in light of Merleau-Ponty’s own reflections. Finally, I draw on passages from The Prose of the World and Eye and Mind to illustrate an original convergence with questions raised by Lacan’s late teachings.

A meditation on specularity as paradigms of a theory of experience which informs every field of philosophy and human sciences, including contemporary neurosciences. And a meditation, starting from neurosciences and mirror neurons, on the different readings of this paradigm of specularity and specularization. In particular, on that “second” reading of specularization, which suggests that the mirror is not an instrument of representation but of expression, not a device of adaquation but of creation. It is an hypothesis that Merleau-Ponty, facing the very same problems contemporary neurosciences are confonted to, reactivates in an increasingly systematic way in his later years, drawing from a tradition which we try here to reconstruct. From Merleau-Ponty to Bergson, from Bergson to Leibniz, this second reading of specularity contains a possibility which is still fruitful and which neurosciences themselves could adopt in order to reconsider in a new perspective the evidences they have considered until now from the point of view of a first reading of specularity. This second reading of specularity suggests that it is not so much necessary to explain how one subject comprehends the other, but how both subjects are comprehended within the transcendental space of what we could call an event. Empathy is not so much a syntonization among subjects, but subjects are a partial and local desyntonization of that empathic system we should place as the beginining and not at the end of the process. Consciousness does not represent the other consciousness, but they express in a simultaneous and specular diffraction the fundamental unity of an event which is every time unique and impersonal.

The aim of this article is to demonstrate the intrinsically technical nature of visual perception and pictorial performance through their common anchorage in the corporeity that brings them into existence. As with any other artistic technique, painting reveals itself to be the natural extension of a technological attitude already rooted in the sensorimotor devices of the body in action; painting is led to inhabit a world that is of the same nature as corporeal agents, because the objects that populate it share with it the ontological element of the “flesh”. Through Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of Cezanne’s pictorial works, I demonstrate that the main purpose of painting is, analogically with the descriptive analyses made possible by the phenomenological reduction, to render intersubjectively evident the hidden work of vision before its sedimentation in an accomplished perceptual scene. As the experiments of contemporary neuroscience also demonstrate, perception is by and large a reconstructive process of “image-making” rather than an allegedly accurate reproduction of the spectacle of the world. Painting, on the other hand, both in terms of creation and for the observer, employs the same sensorimotor resources as instruments.

Through a reading of Merleau-Ponty’s late courses on Nature, this essay presents a new reflection on technique and makes explicit the ontological significance of a rethinking of technique in this period. After an analysis of the historical sense of the notion of Nature and of animal behavior, we turn to cybernetics. The need to rethink man on the basis of his contingency, that is, on the basis of his relationship with the world and with the technical objects through which this relationship is structured, arises in the essay. Merleau-Ponty’s course on Nature has thus allowed us to investigate the ontological significance of the notion of technique by considering technical objects that Merleau-Ponty himself references. Technique, by prolonging Nature, becomes the keystone to the contact between man and Being, thus illustrating the necessity, for philosophy and for culture, of a return to the contact with brute being that founds and inhabits it.

This paper investigates how Merleau-Ponty and Simondon conceived the theory of information and, in particular, assessed its validity as an instrument of analysis in multiple fields of knowledge. Specifically, the comparison will analyze the relationship between organism and environment, which is central both to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of nature and to Simondon’s theory of individuation. For both authors, the analysis of processes of interaction between organism and environment is characterized by the search for a type of causality that distinguishes itself from mechanism, which reduces these interactions to a sum of independent parts occasionally tied by a causally determined relation. However, while Merleau-Ponty views the categories introduced by the theory of information as a mere reconstruction of the mechanistic perspective, Simondon revises these categories to overcome mechanism and move towards the construction of a model of experience based on relation.

The aim of this article is to enrich the concept of technological incorporation, as thematized by Merleau-Pontian phenomenology and post-phenomenology, through a study of the material history of artificial prostheses. We will see in the first section that post-phenomenology, by discussing the plasticity of the corporeal schema, did not recognize the importance of technological transformations; that is, it has given little importance to the inorganic, material correlate through which hybridization is possible. Secondly, we will show how Merleau-Ponty, through a reading of Marx, contributes to phenomenology a naturalistic dialectic between material history and corporeity. This relation appears central to our understanding of the constitutively plastic and performative essence of the corporeal schema. The dialectics that technologies institute, however, do not necessarily lead to an increase in one’s perceptive-agentive capacities. The last section of this article investigates this claim through an analysis of the pathology of phantom limbs, in light of the evolution of prosthetic technologies between the two World Wars.

We typically conceive of sensation as a residue of empiricism and idealism, both of which claim to reduce our experience to a sum of elementary data that the subject encounters. For Merleau-Ponty, sensation is none of these things: it defines our ability to let ourselves be solicited by the relief and questions of the world. What is sensed is not an inert datum but a gesture of existence that concerns me, invites me to correspond to it and follow it. When I respond to the invitations of what I sense, the connection between me and the world functions as the immobile axis around which the whirls of a whirlwind are formed. Whirlwind of sensation or whirlwind of sleep, because sensing is also made of a night time-space in which the connection with things seem to be broken. The inertia of sleep is whirling in its own way, just as the dynamism of sensation has its own condition of possibility in an immeasurable measure of apathy and indifference.