Mutual Determination, Concrescence and Transition. Whitehead’s Speculative Conception of Temporal Subjectivity Interpreted from a Merleau-Pontyan Standpoint

The interpretive approach adopted in this paper is influenced by Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy and in particular by his understanding of Nature, which in turn takes into consideration Whitehead’s work. Whitehead’s philosophy of organism is seen by its author as the metaphysical generalization of problems found in his investigation of natural knowledge. Whitehead admits that a speculative approach is necessitated by the very questions arising from the mathematical concepts of the material world and the revolutions undergone in logic, mathematics and physics at the turn of the century.Whitehead’s understanding of nature is framed from the beginning in terms of a processual approach. However, this notion of process is not fully worked out in the epistemological works and requires a metaphysical deepening. This is due to the fact that the notion of duration adopted in the epistemological works is not sufficient to convey the notion of process. This lack of adequacy is coupled by Whitehead with the need to interpret process in terms of experience. In turn, this notion of experience is wider than the usual one, for it implies that there is experience from the lowest levels onwards. Matter itself experiences. Seen in this perspective, reality is thus conceived in terms of a whole in constant change, whose parts are in mutual connection. This conception derives from Whitehead’s criticism of Aristotle’s substantialism and from his preference for a relationist ontology. The outcome of this approach is a speculative conception of reality in terms of a twofold notion of process: concrescence and transition, which Whitehead sees as the two faces of the creative advance of nature. This dual notion of process is interpreted in this essay in a merleau-pontyan perspective.

Compte rendu de Claudio Cormick, Opacidad y relativismo. La situacionalidad del conocimiento en tensión entre Merleau-Ponty y Foucault

In Opacidad y relativismo. La situacionalidad del conocimiento en tensión entre Merleau-Ponty y Foucault, Claudio Cormick introduces Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s and Michel Foucault’s philosophies as attempts to face two possible obstacles for human knowledge : on the one hand, the opacity of consciousness with regard to the foundations of its own positions; on the other, the relative, non-absolute character of our claims to truth, inasmuch as they are formulated within concrete social and historical conditions.

Review of Mauro Carbone, Philosophy-Screens: From Cinema to the Digital Revolution

In this text, my aim is to provide a reading of Mauro Carbone’s Philosophy Screens: From Cinema to the Digital Revolution in the context of his other writings. My claim is that in this most recent work, Carbone makes a decisive step from being an original interpreter of the work of Merleau-Ponty and Proust to making an original contribution to what I describe, following Merleau-Ponty and Carbone, the history of “a-philosophy”: an historical attempt to reverse the “official philosophy” that has been with us since at least Plato. This reversal is staged through a series of concepts, created by Carbone, that I take up here viz à viz Plato’s allegory of the cave: the archescreen, the sensible idea, the screen, and philosophy-cinema (a concept borrowed from Deleuze). Together, these concepts illustrate what I call, borrowing a phrase from Jean-Luc Nancy, a philosophical partance: for Carbone, the work of “philosophizing” should no longer be conceptualized in accordance with Platonic imagery of ascent, illumination, conversion, and importantly, grasping and seizing upon the είδη but as “departure”: allowing the objects of thought their transcendence, a liquidity by which they slip through our grasp.

L’essere grezzo della tecnica

Through a reading of Merleau-Ponty’s late courses on Nature, this essay presents a new reflection on technique and makes explicit the ontological significance of a rethinking of technique in this period. After an analysis of the historical sense of the notion of Nature and of animal behavior, we turn to cybernetics. The need to rethink man on the basis of his contingency, that is, on the basis of his relationship with the world and with the technical objects through which this relationship is structured, arises in the essay. Merleau-Ponty’s course on Nature has thus allowed us to investigate the ontological significance of the notion of technique by considering technical objects that Merleau-Ponty himself references. Technique, by prolonging Nature, becomes the keystone to the contact between man and Being, thus illustrating the necessity, for philosophy and for culture, of a return to the contact with brute being that founds and inhabits it.

La sensazione e il vortice del sonno

We typically conceive of sensation as a residue of empiricism and idealism, both of which claim to reduce our experience to a sum of elementary data that the subject encounters. For Merleau-Ponty, sensation is none of these things: it defines our ability to let ourselves be solicited by the relief and questions of the world. What is sensed is not an inert datum but a gesture of existence that concerns me, invites me to correspond to it and follow it. When I respond to the invitations of what I sense, the connection between me and the world functions as the immobile axis around which the whirls of a whirlwind are formed. Whirlwind of sensation or whirlwind of sleep, because sensing is also made of a night time-space in which the connection with things seem to be broken. The inertia of sleep is whirling in its own way, just as the dynamism of sensation has its own condition of possibility in an immeasurable measure of apathy and indifference.

Médiation phénoménale du corps vécu. Embodiment et corporéalité en émergence sous l’effet des technologies

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.