This article studies a link between perception and politics by seeking, in Merleau-Ponty’s work, something like a “mirror relation” in the domains of encounters of love and politics. While in Phenomenology of Perception the analysis of sexuality seemingly renders love impossible, in the courses on Institution, Merleau-Ponty affirms the possibility of love by characterizing it as an institution, a sensible idea, a “mirror relation”. When the lover demands signs of love from the loved one, he demands to see in the eyes, the voice, and the experience of the other his own reflection, the reflection of his experience, his words, his gestures, and the demand of love that he is formulating. The promise of love is thus an institution of sense which sheds a new light on all actions past and future, it is a way of overcoming contingency. Conceiving of politics as a “mirror relation” thus means adopting a careful philosophy that observes the event like a mirror and gives place to sensible ideas, at the intersection of gazes understood as a “type of reflection”.

The inventiveness of life is at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology because by separating with behaviorism, philosophy could dialogue with the sciences of development to describe several techniques that we successively study as degrees in the normativity of the living : immanent techniques, ecological techniques, bodily intelligence, and, finally, morphogenetic techniques of development. Through this analysis, we demonstrate the thesis of an activation of the living body from its reflex reactivity to its non-intentional projections in its forms.

The mediation of the performative body raises the question of the re-evaluation of the lived body in relation to phenomena of re-creation or re-composition involving the sensible and somatic body when it is affected by technology and incorporates its effects. To understand this phenomenon, this essay examines the interrelation of the notions of corporality (a notion which concerns the physical body in its materiality, or the anthropomorphic body), corporeality, and embodiment through a transdisciplinary approach and as an anchoring to a dynamic of self-eco-organization. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy underpins the very foundations of this research and will allow us to reflect on the new status of the contemporary body in technological contexts. Two main notions will be used. “Corporeality”, as a form of the lived body and a transdisciplinary concept and embodiment as an act of integration by the body – here in a technological environment. In the evolution of the interrelation between the body and the changing environment, the two are in trans-relation, a trans-formation occurs. To conclude, we propose to analyze these new “realities” in a Merleau-Pontian and Nietzschean interconnected approach, that is, through a philosophy of becoming, a philosophy that flows through the body: being a body, doing, risking and creating – a philosophy that resonates with this trans-formation.

The aim of this essay is to connect the notion of the Anthropocene with Merleau-Pontyan thought by drawing on two aspects of the author’s ontological reflection. First, I consider “the event of the Anthropocene” as an event that is part of an instituting dynamic, in reference to the ontological dimension of “Institution” that Merleau-Ponty borrows from Husserl and develops in an original way in his 1954-1955 lectures at the Collège de France. I then underline the difficulties that arise when multiple names are employed to designate our “current geological era” in debates on the Anthropocene, a complex global event with political, ethical, and social dimensions. To conclude, I show that this multiplication of names is constitutive of the event of the Anthropocene. The Merleau-Pontyan idea of “a theme that constitutes itself through its variations,” introduced by Mauro Carbone in his work on sensible ideas and the “arche-screen” and closely linked to the element of “Institution,” can help us find philosophical advancements at the heart of this contemporary naming debate.

This essay proposes interdisciplinary work converging around a concept (the Anthropocene), a philosophical tradition (phenomenology), and an author (Merleau-Ponty) in order to overcome the limits of intelligibility to which can be confronted approaches that favor a single perspective on these themes, or a single theme approached from different perspectives. The first section of the essay develops a triple return to the foundations of the problem which interests us by treating in a synthetic manner the following three questions: what is the Anthropocene? What does the idea of human autonomy truly mean? Can phenomenology help us think their encounter? The second section briefly introduces the reflective context in which Merleau-Ponty developed his thinking on Nature, on the human being as it emerges from Nature, and on technique in its relation both to the human being and to Nature. By adopting Merleau-Pontyan thought as a critical framework, the third section examines the current paradigm for the co-production of scientific knowledge and its implication for the inclusion of non-human nature.

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.