This article examines the place of literature in the ensemble of Merleau-Ponty’s research, comparing the function it fills in the economy of his thought to the role other practices and other disciplines such as biology and psychology play in his philosophy. Each of these “discourses” offered Merleau-Ponty access to something comparable to a common phantasmatic substance, a common metaphorical stability of Being, that the biologist, the writer, and the psychoanalyst work on, each in their own writings and categories. But here emerges also a major question. To what extent does the language of Proust reveal itself up to the task of writing the phantasm, to what extent does it respond to this challenge? In what manner are the limits of his language, which are perhaps the limits of language itself, an obstacle to his project? And what is it that permits, at times, the sciences to obtain greater success in engaging in this way? Was it precisely the structure of metaphor that hindered Proust in truly writing encroachment, and the dimension of metonymy was, on the contrary, that in which a certain scientific discourse succeeded at setting itself up on the first try? If, finally and especially, metonymy was the very heart of metaphor, with more or less success touched by one or the other of the “regional” writings of the phantasm?

The purpose of this paper is to study the role of language in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. In particular, our analysis will concentrate mainly on The Prose of the World and, following that, on the notes about the novels of Claude Simon. Thus, we will attempt to discern the specific nature of such language, analyzing its sources, exploring its limits, and examining in detail its potentialities.

In the text of his lecture on “Film and the new psychology,” Merleau-Ponty introduces a singular and decisive reading of filmic art, approaching the notion of “rhythm.” This notion engages in a reflection on image and on the relation between the image and the gaze of the spectator at the cinema. In this article, Merleau-Ponty’s actual usage of this notion and the meaning of this operation will be read starting from the reflection of Émile Benveniste on rhythm as well as certain notes presented in Merleau-Ponty’s courses at the Collège de France on The sensible world and the world of expression and Research on the literary usages of language, that follow some years after the lecture.

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.