This book shows that screens don’t just distribute the visible and the invisible, but have always mediated our body's relationships with the physical and anthropological-cultural environment. By combining a series of historical-genealogical reconstructions going back to prehistoric times with the analysis of present and near-future technologies, the authors show that screens have always incorporated not only the hiding/showing functions but also the protecting/exposing ones, as the Covid-19 pandemic retaught us. The intertwining of these functions allows the authors to criticize the mainstream ideas of images as inseparable from screens, of words as opposed to images, and of what they call “Transparency 2.0” ideology, which currently dominates our socio-political life. Moreover, they show how wearable technologies don’t approximate us to a presumed disappearance of screens but seem to draw a circular pathway back to using our bodies as screens. This raises new relational, ethical, and political questions, which this book helps to illuminate.

Merleau-Ponty has long been known as one of the most important philosophers of aesthetics, yet most discussions of his aesthetics focus on visual art. This book corrects that balance by turning to Merleau-Ponty's extensive engagement with literature. From Proust, Merleau-Ponty developed his conception of "sensible ideas," from Claudel, his conjoining of birth and knowledge as "co-naissance," from Valery came "implex" or the "animal of words" and the "chiasma of two destinies." Literature also provokes the questions of expression, metaphor, and truth and the meaning of a Merleau-Pontian poetics. The poetic of Merleau-Ponty is, the book argues, a poetic of the flesh, a poetic of mystery, and a poetic of the visible in its relation to the invisible. Ultimately, theoretical figures or "figuratives" that appear at the threshold between philosophy and literature enable the possibility of a new ontology. What is at stake is the very meaning of philosophy itself and its mode of expression.

Merleau-Ponty has long been known as one of the most important philosophers of aesthetics, yet most discussions of his aesthetics focus on visual art. This book corrects that balance by turning to Merleau-Ponty's extensive engagement with literature. From Proust, Merleau-Ponty developed his conception of "sensible ideas," from Claudel, his conjoining of birth and knowledge as "co-naissance," from Valery came "implex" or the "animal of words" and the "chiasma of two destinies." Literature also provokes the questions of expression, metaphor, and truth and the meaning of a Merleau-Pontian poetics. The poetic of Merleau-Ponty is, the book argues, a poetic of the flesh, a poetic of mystery, and a poetic of the visible in its relation to the invisible. Ultimately, theoretical figures or "figuratives" that appear at the threshold between philosophy and literature enable the possibility of a new ontology. What is at stake is the very meaning of philosophy itself and its mode of expression.

The title of the third volume of Chiasmi International deliberately reverses the tutle of one of Merleau-Ponty's last courses. Moreover, two unpublished notes concerning music make up the unusual opening of this volume. In these two ways, we are intending to emphasize that more than ever we must pay attention to Merleau-Ponty's particular tendency to seek the reason of (his) philosophy in non-philosophy. This attention is exactly what serves as the guiding thread throughout the ssays collected here, some of which have been solicited from the partecipants of the fourth "International Symposium of Phenomenology" (Perugia, 2000) while others were presented in the third seminar on Merleau-Ponty at the Husserl Archives in Paris (2000-2001). Texts by: Daniela Calabro, Mauro Carbone, Fabio Ciaramelli, Francesco Colli, Duane H. Davis, Wayne Froman, Michael Gendre, Xavier Guchet, Alexandre Hubeny, Kurt Dauer Keller, Enrica Lisciani-Petrini, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ann V. Murphy, Andrea Pinotti, Mario Todoro Ramirez Cobian, Myriam Revault D'Allones, Calvin O. Schrag, Clara da Silva-Charrak, Davide Scarso, Cecilia Sjoholm, Jenny Slatman, Ted Toadvine, Robert Vallier.