Building on Merleau-Ponty’s recognition of the mutually expressive relation between the body and the space it occupies, I borrow from queer and feminist phenomenologies to reflect on the spatiality of subjects constrained to heterosexuality – a constraint that functions as a common ground, always already present, of the kind that Merleau-Ponty argued was constitutive of subject/world relations. If it is the case, as many feminist theorists after Adrienne Rich argued, that the patriarchal norm orients us early on toward the opposite gender, then there is much to be learned from studying the notion of feminine space and the erasure of the subject in this space -an erasure that has been largely discussed within recent feminist phenomenological work, notably in relation to the contrasting extension of men in space –, particularly as both are established in relation to male desire. Our aim is to argue that because it is temporal, and because it involves sedimentation and habit, the study of this orientational constraint through the lens of Merleau-Ponty could allow us to open up the future of gendered norms, and, through this, of gendered practices of sharing space.

Building on Gilles Deleuze’s famous declaration that “the brain is the screen”, wholly emblematic of his thinking on cinema, this essay interrogates the place of the body within this thought in relation to Merleau-Pontyan-inspired critiques. My aim is to determine whether Deleuze offers a theory of the perceiving body in relation to spectatorial experience, despite the risk that it possibly imply a logical contradiction in the construction of the diptych on cinema. Indeed, the insistence of the body in this experience, as can be seen from Deleuze’s two works, could deny the very possibility of this “objective and diffuse” perception to which the movement-image would give us access according to the philosopher.

The time of the confrontation between psychoanalysis and philosophy seems to belong in the past, and even to be outdated. A new path, however, is available to us today. We must concern ourselves less with the benefits of philosophy for psychoanalysis (claiming, for example, that it could illuminate that which it looks for differently) and more with the shockwaves that psychoanalysis has generated within philosophy. Philosophy, and phenomenology in particular, has reached its “limits.” These limits are not the limits of a discipline, but those of thought itself. “Can we think the unthinkable?” – such is the question that psychoanalysis asks phenomenology. By retracing Freud’s trajectory, and in particular his passage from the first to the second topical, which was caused by phenomena leading him to radicalize his thought (First World War, death of his daughter Sophie, cancer), this essay attempts to make visible how phenomenology, too, must now deepen its project. The expression « Ça n’a rien à voir » (in which Ça refers to the Freudian id) will say, strictly speaking, that the “Ça” in the second topic cannot be seen because it can neither be seen nor aimed at, and yet it always stays there. This obscure point of thought is also that which phenomenology today must attempt. It is on this basis, and on this basis only, that the confrontation between psychoanalysis “and” philosophy will find its impetus and be renewed.

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.

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.

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.

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.