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.

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.

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.

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.