In this essay, the author intends to show the reasons for the interest on the Critique of Judgment, and especially to aesthetic judgment of taste within thephenomenological context. The study is divided into four sections: at first the concept of aesthetic reflective judgment will be introduced, highlighting the crucial role it assumes within the Kantian critical project as a whole (I). In a second step the specificity of the judgment of taste will be studied with particular attention on its character of Zweckmässigkeit and its universal voice (II). In the third section it will be shown how the judgment of taste introduces a new paradigmatic articulation of the relationship between feeling and thinking, which is further explained through a critical comparison with the interpretations of Jean-Francois Lyotard and Marc Richir (III) of aesthetic judgment. In the last and more extended section, the affinity of the disinterested character of the judgment of taste with the phenomenological attitude will be at the center of the research (IV).

This essay examines the presence of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. The perspective adopted here is methodological. Central to this is the choice of “transcendental phenomenology,” understood as a rehabilitation of the idealism and subjectivism proper to the transcendentalism of Kant and Fichte—the choice by which Merleau-Ponty refuses to abandon transcendental philosophy, like Hegel on the contrary did with his dialectical-speculative philosophy, and follows instead the phenomenological perspective suggested for the first time by Schelling.

In this essay, I intend to show the evolution that the thought of Merleau-Ponty undergoes from the Phenomenology of Perception to The Visible and the Invisible. I do so by employing the Merleau-Pontyian notions of “radical reflection” and “hyper-reflection,” which I will consider as expressions of two alternative ways of resolving the task of philosophy: to highlight, in the first case, the immediate relation between the subject and the world, in the second case, the chiasm between the thinking and the Being of the world. There are three main stages to my reasoning: 1) to show the conceptual differences that obtain between the first Merleau-Pontyian phenomenology and the Hegelian philosophy; 2) to illustrate the insufficiency, recognized ex post by Merleau-Ponty himself, of the existential analyses contained in the Phenomenology of Perception; 3) to identify the concept that allows him to formulate a new ontology, and to go beyond the Hegelian dialectic, in the “nature” which is spoken of in the positive philosophy of the late Schelling.

In the 1956-1957 course titled “The Concept of Nature”, Merleau-Ponty takes up Schelling’s thought. In reading Merleau-Ponty’s text on Schelling’s philosophy, we arrive at a point of contact between the philosophy of natural productivity and the philosophy of intellectual or artistic intuition. Merleau-Ponty seems to discover the Schellingian idea of the absolute as an abyss against the Cartesian idea of God as creator. The Merleau-Pontian interpretation of Schelling’s philosophy of nature and art from his course gives us one of the keys to his unfinished ontology, which is that nature and art, physis and logos, are tied up in the perception of the dimension of being given in painting or poetry, as the analysis of painting in Eye and Mind will show us an organon of the ontology of the savage being.

The psychoanalyical notion of the unconscious is often considered as being out of reach for phenomenological thinking. When Merleau-Ponty refl ects on it, he takes the unconscious as the realm, in bodily life, that being not yet conscious, is likely to become conscious. He formulates it in his Résumés de cours with the famous sentence “The unconscious is the sensing itself”. Lacan, facing this interpretation, explains that Merleau-Ponty fails to recongnize the essential discontinuity between consciousness and the unconscious. From that criticism, it is possible to follow the reflection of Félix Guattari who develops, both alone and in collaboration with Gilles Deleuze, a conception of the “machinic unconscious”, a notion that can be read as an attempt to articulate the merleau-pontian and the lacanian approaches and to sketch out a theory of the becoming-subject. My aim in this paper, in speaking about “Merleau-Ponty Tomorrow”, consists therefore in appropriating some of his suggestions in this regard and to detect them in an unexpected context (the writing of Guattari), thereby also noting the differences between them. Through this dialogue, I get to a position where it is possible to outline a critique of the contemporary “theory of the self”, which in myview is unaware of the fact that the self is always already caught in power relations. Guattari’s “micropolitics of desire” allows precisely to account for that and thus to develop the phenomenological approach to the self.

Véronique Fóti’s Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty demonstrates how the problem of expression motivates and unifies Merleau-Ponty’s investigations of art, life, nature, and ontology, culminating in a timely conception of nature as a differential expressive matrix. The key to this expressive ontology is diacritical difference. We raise three questions for this diacritical ontology: how it embodies the memory of the world, how it is interrupted by transcendence, and how it dissolves into elementality. Our inquiry points towards a diacritics of the inexpressible.

This article aims to delineate a phenomenology of cinema centered on the double incorporation that Merleau-Ponty’s thought allows us to see at work in film. This incorporation is, first, of the elements in each other, and, second and primarily, of beings themselves, making of cinema a new way of symbolizing thinking and the relation to the other. To understand this double incorporation, we take up the question of the Gestalt and its evolution in the work of Merleau-Ponty, since it is through the Gestalt that Merleau-Ponty not only evades the impasses of the theories, subjectivist as well as objectivist, of movement and image, but also succeeds in establishing—by way of a long and precise dialogue with the new natural sciences—an a-subjective phenomenology of the body. Intersubjectivity finally gives way to an “intercorporeity” that would itself be the ground of a redefinition of imagination and its relationship to perception. We thus find the source of a new aesthetics, where cinema reclaims what is proper to it.

I suggest how Merleau-Pontian sense hinges on an ontology in which passivity and what I call “development” are fundamental. This means, though, that the possibility of philosophy cannot be guaranteed in advance: philosophy is a joint operation of philosophers and being, and is radically contingent on a pre-philosophical field. Merleau-Ponty thus transforms philosophy, revealing a philosophy of tomorrow: a new way of doing philosophy that, because it is grounded in pre-reflective contingency, has to wait to describe its beginnings, and so has to keep studying its beginnings tomorrow. This does not destroy Husserl’s project of a transcendental philosophy, it just accepts that the transcendental conditions of philosophy cannot be constituted or even revealed via wholly active or autonomous reflection. Merleau-Ponty thus brings phenomenology down to earth by expanding it into a phenomenology of life and earth that describes the concrete beginnings of phenomena and phenomenology.

In light of the political facts of his time and his own experience, Merleau-Ponty tries, in the preface to Signs, to detect a general structure of history and culture. Concerned with establishing a concrete philosophy, the French philosopher never detached his political reflection from the particularity of circumstances. This article proposes to take up both the spirit and method of Merleau-Ponty. With regard to the spirit, this is a matter of seeing whether the analyses in the preface to Signs still make sense for us today. With regard to method, we try to develop an interpretation anchored in the current experience of French politics. This rootedness in current events is fundamental if we do not want to betray the concern for contingency, the sign of a concrete political approach. We will find that the ethics of engagement defined by Merleau-Ponty in the expression, “virtu without resignation” could also be the response to certain contemporary problems.

The notion of emotion in phenomenology involves the centrality of the concept of “value.” This general assumption is here articulated in three theses. The first thesis concerns the public, expressive and behavioral nature of emotion. The second thesis relates to its corporeal and material nature. The third maintains that the structure of emotion is essentially temporal. Each of these arguments converges in emphasizing the irruption of an impersonal dimension into human consciousness, and in particular into emotional consciousness. The objective of this essay is to probe this sub-categorical, or inter-corporeal, dimension from the dual viewpoint of phenomenology and psychoanalysis.La notion d’émotion en phénoménologie implique la centralité du concept de « valeur ». Cette supposition est ici articulée en trois thèses. La première concerne la nature publique, expressive et comportementale de l’émotion. La seconde se rapporte à la nature corporelle et matérielle de l’émotion. La troisième soutient que la tructure de l’émotion est essentiellement temporelle. Ces trois arguments permettent de souligner l’irruption d’une dimension impersonnelle au sein de la conscience humaine, et en particulier dans la conscience émotionnelle. L’objectif de cet essai est de sonder cette dimension sous-catégorique, ou inter-corporelle, à partir du double point de vue de la phénoménologie et de la psychanalyse. La nozione di emozione in fenomenologia implica la centralità del concetto di “valore”. Nel presente articolo, questo assunto generale è articolato secondo tre tesi. La prima concerne l’aspetto pubblico, espressivo e comportamentale dell’emozione. La seconda ha a che fare con la sua natura corporea e materiale. La terza afferma il carattere essenzialmente temporale dell’emozione. Queste argomentazioni convergono nel tentativo di mettere in luce l’irruzione di una dimensione impersonale nella coscienza umana, e in particolare nella coscienza emozionale. L’obiettivo di questo studio è esaminare questa dimensione sub-categoriale, o inter-corporea, dal duplice punto di vista della fenomenologia e della psicoanalisi.

This essay revolves around certain core themes that return in cycles and intertwine with each other at the intersection of several authors: hallucination in Phenomenology of Perception, from which I closely re-read the passages concerning the difficult relationship of discernibility and indiscernibility between hallucinatory and perceived things, which in the experience of the patient tends toward a kind of superimposition that gives life to an image and that is more than one yet less than two; the look, the encounter, and the dream in Jacques Lacan’s Seminar XI, which I re-read starting from the famous parable of Chuang-Tse who dreams of being a butterfly dreaming of being Chuang-Tse; Georges Didi-Huberman’s reflections on the relation of encounter, image, and memory that again rely on the figure of the butterfly, its ephemeral appearance, the contradictory attempt to follow and capture it, the utopia of the collector who loses it in catching it; and, finally, the double return of the figure of the butterfly in the pages of Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood and in Winfried Sebald’s novel, Austerlitz.Cet essai tourne autour de certains noyaux thématiques qui reviennent de manière cyclique et qui s’entrelacent l’un dans l’autre dans les croisements des auteurs examiné : l’hallucination dans Phénoménologie de la perception, dont je relis minutieusement les pages consacrées à la question du rapport difficile, tout ensemble de discernabilité et d’indiscernabilité entre chose hallucinée et chose perçue, qui dans l’expérience du patient tendent à une sorte de surimpression qui donne vie à une image et qui est plus qu’un et moins que deux ; le regard, la rencontre et le rêve dans le Séminaire XI de Jacques Lacan, relu à partir de la célèbre parabole de Chuang-Tse qui rêve d’être un papillon qui rêve d’être Chuang-Tse ; et encore, les réflexions que consacre Georges Didi-Huberman au rapport entre rencontre, image et mémoire, se référant à son tour à la figure du papillon, à son apparition éphémère, à la tentative contradictoire de le suivre et de le capturer, à l’utopie du collectionneur qui le perd en l’attrapant ; enfin, le double retour de la figure du papillon dans les pages de l’Enfance berlinoise de Walter Benjamin et dans le roman de Winfried Sebald, Austerlitz.Questo saggio ruota attorno ad alcuni nuclei tematici che ritornano ciclicamente e si intrecciano l’uno all’altro nel trascorrere dall’uno all’altro degli autori esaminati: l’allucinazione in Fenomenologia della percezione, le cui pagine vengono rilette con minuziosa attenzione isolando la questione del difficile rapporto, insieme di discernibilità e indiscernibilità tra cosa allucinata e cosa percepita, che nell’esperienza del paziente tendono a una sorta di sovraimpressione che dà vita a un’immagine che è più di un uno e meno di un due; lo sguardo, l’incontro e il sogno nel Seminario XI di Jacques Lacan, riletto a partire dalla celebre parabola di Chuang-tse che sogna di essere una farfalla che sogna di essere Chuang-tse; e ancora, le riflessioni che Georges Didi-Huberman dedica al rapporto tra incontro, immagine, memoria, affidandosi a sua volta alla figura della farfalla, alla sua apparizione effimera, al tentativo contraddittorio di inseguirla e catturarla, all’utopia del collezionista che la fa propria perdendola; infine, il doppio ritorno della figura della farfalla nelle pagine di Infanzia berlinese di Walter Benjamin e nel romanzo di Winfried Sebald, Austerlitz.

In this paper I aim to discuss an essay written by the French psychoanalyst André Green on occasion of the publication in 1964 of The Visible and the Invisible, in order to frame it within the context of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy for the sake of letting emerge both the critical importance and some structural issues implied in Green’s reading.Green’s study clearly points out that the question concerning Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “flesh” represents a fundamental theme for psychoanalysis, in connection with Lacan’s interpretation of the unconscious as “structured as a language.” As Green would more widely stress in further works, he disagrees with Lacan and follows Merleau-Ponty on this point.At the same time, Green remarks that in Merleau-Ponty’s perspective there still remain two unsolved issues: his conceiving of the unconscious basically as “other side” and not, like in Freud, in terms of “other scene;” and the question concerning affects, seen as not sufficiently worked out within Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological perspective. Yet, even if it is possible to accept some of the critical remarks made by Green, it is nevertheless also necessary to reformulate them within a wider and deeper reading of the ontology of the flesh.Le but de cet article est de discuter un essai écrit par le psychanalyste André Green à l’occasion de la publication en 1964 du Visible et l’Invisible, afin de le questionner dans le contexte de la philosophie de Merleau-Ponty et de laisser émerger à la fois l’importance critique et quelque problèmes implicites de la lecture de Green.L’étude de Green montre clairement que la question concernant la notion merleau-pontienne de « chair » représente un thème fondamental pour la psychanalyse, en rapport avec l’interprétation lacanienne de l’inconscient, selon lui, « structuré comme un langage ». Dans ses travaux suivants, Green insistera sur son désaccord avec Lacan et suivra Merleau-Ponty sur ce point. Au même moment, Green remarque que dans la perspective merleau-pontienne, il demeure deux problèmes non résolus : sa conception de l’inconscient en termes d’« autre côté » et non, comme chez Freud, d’« autre scène » ; et la question concernant les affects, qui n’est pas suffisamment travaillée au sein de la perspective phénoménologique de Merleau-Ponty. Cependant, bien qu’il soit possible d’accepter certaines remarques critiques de Green, il est néanmoins nécessaire de les reformuler au sein d’une lecture plus vaste et plus profonde de l’ontologie de la chair. In questo saggio ci si propone di discutere un saggio dello psicoanalista André Green, scritto in occasione della pubblicazione di Il visibile e l’invisibile in Francia nel 1964, e contenente alcune notazioni molto importanti per comprendere un determinato modo di ricezione dell’ontologia fenomenologica di Merleau-Ponty da parte di uno psicoanalista originale e competente sia in materia di fenomenologia sia di psicoanalisi.Lo studio di Green mostra un significato particolare sia in quanto segnala molto per tempo l’importanza dell’opera di Merleau-Ponty per la psicoanalisi, sia perché indica chiaramente alcuni snodi problematici che in seguito sarebbero stati spesso rielaborati da parte di lettori dell’opera di Merleau-Ponty appartenenti al movimento psicoanalitico. In questo saggio ci si propone dunque di esaminare le notazioni di Green e di metterle nel contesto del pensiero di Merleau-Ponty al fine di farne emergere sia l’importanza critica sia però anche alcuni problemi di fondo.Lo studio di Green indica con chiarezza come la questione della carne costituisca un tema fondamentale anche per la ricerca psicoanalitica, in particolare in relazione all’interpretazione data da Lacan al concetto di inconscio “strutturato come un linguaggio”. Come avrebbe in seguito più ampiamente mostrato, Green non è d’accordo con Lacan e in questo segue alcune indicazioni di Merleau-Ponty. Al contempo, non manca di far notare due problematiche irrisolte nell’ottica di Merleau-Ponty: il concepire fondamentalmente l’inconscio come “altro lato” e non, come in Freud, in termini di “altra scena”; in secondo luogo il problema dell’affetto, come tema irrisolto all’interno della prospettiva fenomenologica di Merleau-Ponty.Seguendo lo snodo di questo studio è possibile così far emergere con chiarezza il significato innovativo del concetto merleau-pontyano di carne, anche al di là dell’interpretazione di Green, quale possibile sfondo ontologico di una indagine categoriale sui concetti portanti della psicoanalisi. In definitiva se è lecito recepire alcune delle critiche mosse da Green a Merleau-Ponty, è però anche necessario riformularle all’interno di una più approfondita lettura dell’ontologia della carne.

In a note from the course on passivity, we find a reflection by Merleau-Ponty on the nature of the dream as an echo. Between wakefulness and sleep, but also between dream and waking, the echo would never cease to structure our whole psychic life through its reverberations, building bridges between dimensions that language can only separate. The dream would therefore be the event of a certain echo, each time unique. Hence Merleau-Ponty’s idea of making this echo an ally for understanding the dream, a theoretical schema that transforms the concepts of understanding and psychical hermeneutics as well as our representation of voice and sound.Dans une note du cours sur la passivité, on trouve une réflexion de Merleau-Ponty sur la nature du rêve en tant qu’écho. Entre éveil et sommeil, mais aussi entre rêve et veille, l’écho n’arrêterait pas de structurer par sa réverbération notre entière vie psychique, en construisant des ponts entre des dimensions que la langue ne saurait que séparer. Le rêve serait donc l’événement d’un certain écho, à chaque fois unique. D’où l’idée de Merleau-Ponty de faire de cet écho un allié pour la compréhension du rêve, schéma théorique qui transforme tantôt les notions de compréhension et d’herméneutique psychique, tantôt la représentation que l’on a de la voix et du son.In un appunto per il corso sulla passività Merleau-Ponty ha annotato un inconsueto pensiero sulla natura del sogno come eco. Tra veglia e sonno, ma anche tra sogno e veglia, quest’eco non smetterebbe di strutturare sulla sua riverberazione l’intera nostra vita psichica, costruendo ponti tra dimensioni che la lingua solitamente separa. Il sogno sarebbe dunque l’evento di un’eco singolare, ogni volta unica. Da qui l’idea di Merleau-Ponty di fare proprio di questa eco l’alleato per la comprensione del sogno, disegno teorico che trasforma tanto le nozioni di comprensione e di ermeneutica psichica, quanto la rappresentazione che della voce e del suono diamo abitualmente.

Starting with Freud’s views on the differences in how reality is approached in neurosis and in psychosis, the article analyzes how Merleau-Ponty and Lacan understand hallucinatory phenomena. For Merleau-Ponty, the perceived object is an actual reality, while Lacan questions both the unity and the facticity of this object. Lacan, following Freud, highlights the fantasmatic aspect of reality, which he distinguishes from the real. Merleau-Ponty, in contrast, focuses on the interaction of subject and object in hallucinations, which he relates to ordinary perception. He views hallucination as an error of consciousness; Lacan finds in it a new reality, which is neither more nor less false than the reality of neurosis.À partir des points de vue de Freud concernant les différentes manières dont la réalité est approchée dans la névrose et dans la psychose, cet article analyse comment Merleau-Ponty et Lacan comprennent le phénomène hallucinatoire. Pour Merleau-Ponty, l’objet perçu est une réalité actuelle, tandis que Lacan questionne à la fois l’unité et la facticité de cet objet. Lacan, suivant Freud, souligne l’aspect fantasmatique de la réalité, qu’il distingue du réel. Merleau-Ponty en revanche, met l’accent sur l’interaction du sujet et de l’objet dans les hallucinations, qu’il rapporte à la perception ordinaire. Il conçoit l’hallucination comme une erreur de la conscience ; Lacan y trouve une nouvelle réalité, qui n’est ni plus ni moins fausse que la réalité de la névrose. A partire dalla distinzione delineata da Freud riguardo al modo in cui la realtà è affrontata nella nevrosi e nella psicosi, il presente articolo prende in esame il modo in cui Merleau-Ponty e Lacan comprendono i fenomeni allucinatori. Per Merleau-Ponty l’oggetto percepito è una realtà attuale, laddove invece Lacan pone in questione al contempo l’unicità e la fatticità di tale oggetto. Seguendo Freud, Lacan sottolinea l’aspetto fantasmatico della realtà, che egli distingue da ciò che chiama reale. Al contrario Merleau-Ponty si concentra sull’interazione tra soggetto e oggetto, nel suo esame delle allucinazioni, che collega alla percezione ordinaria. L’allucinazione è allora vista come un errore della coscienza, mentre Lacan individua in essa una nuova realtà, da considerare come né più falsa, né meno falsa della realtà della nevrosi.