Alessandra Scotti

This work focuses on the apocalyptic nature of Giorgio Agamben's philosophical works. The dialogue with Agamben is full of references to St. Paul's letters, Kafka's literary works and Benjamin's messianism. This work tries to define the criteria of the kairological time, considered as a section of the chronological time which deactivates the discretionary mechanism, along the same lines as St. Paul's lessons, which reformulate the distinction between Jews / non-Jews. In this diacritic strategy lies the secret of any future philosophy, that is profanation, meant as the abolition of any sacred limit and the return to a human use.

In recent years, the concept of the Anthropocene has summoned such an archipelago of senses that the academic debate related to this term, which initially emerged in the natural sciences, has since penetrated the fields of philosophy, economy, history, and sociology. To draw a possible cartography of the Anthropocene, we wish before anything else to emphasize the intrinsic connection between the debate on the Anthropocene and the theme of climate change, and, more generally, of the environmental crisis. We will attempt to show, also, how a Merleau-Pontyan philosophy that is constitutively dedicated to overcoming dichotomies – philosophy and non-philosophy, nature and culture, subject and object – can provide a valuable methodological and ontological support for the study of the environmental question and the ecological crisis. This philosophy belongs, in its own right, among the non-sad philosophies for thinking climate change.

Design between Persuasion and Rhetoric. Footnotes to Peter Sloterdijk What is design? In this article we’ll try to explain how design is a phenomena of contemporary world, as an expression of the power typical of human being. In this regard, design, is conceived from the point of view of “operativeness”, and it shows how post-modernism is born from modernism, with no empowerment from a logic of power. Furthermore design shows several points of contacts with the ancient rhetoric: both of them work as “simulators of sovereignty”, by giving a power otherwise impossible to give. Rhetoric, ritual, power: through these three categories we are going to rethink design as one of the events more fascinating of postmodernism.

This paper investigates Maurice Merleau‐Ponty’s interest about Freud’s philosophical works. It invokes the Freud’s recognition as “Master of the School of suspicion”, a famous definition made by Paul Ricœur. According to Ricœur, Freud’s theories take place within the philosophical stream that looks at “constituted cogito” with deep mistrust. Through the analysis of “Phenomenology of Perception” we can observe the accusation of “pansexuality” moved by Merleau‐Ponty. However, as Merleau‐ Ponty’s philosophy develops and his view changes from “existential” to “ontological”, the relation between Freud and Merleau‐Ponty changes accordingly, until the acknowledgment of the unconscious as a prediction of the “chair”.

IMAGE IS REALITY: BETWEEN SPECTRES AND LIVING DEAD This paper investigates the concept of image and imagination. It starts with Bergson’s theories of image in “Matter and memory” that invoke a new epistemic idea according to which the image is not more a copy of reality, but reality itself. This “philosophy of image” allow rethinking the knowledge process as impersonal, released from the concept of subjectivity. Through the analysis of Blanchot we can observe how the image is similar to deads, or better, to living deads. The image, floating between what is alive and what is dead, makes trembling any separation between the effective and not‐ effective, being and not‐being, the virtual and the actual. Lastly for these reasons we have to rethink it.

This paper sets out from a specific literary style, autofiction, which bounds autobiographical inputs to mere fiction. It will be focused the persistent ambiguity of this narrative form, aiming to an impossible sincerity. Indeed the problem of truth is precisely the spot where philosophy and literature meet each other’s destiny, as proved by Merlau‐Ponty’s theory of expression and the use of literary style. Since when contemporary philosophy challenged rationalistic claims coming from traditional metaphysics, literature stops to be its “ugly twin”. Since when philosophy is not charged of explaining the world anymore, but creating a version of it, literature has become increasingly influent.

In this article, we aim to focus on the notion of Earth in Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the concept of nature and his reinterpretation of the Husserlian Umsturz. In doing so, we will use the expression “Earth-making” to describe a particular instituting dynamic, where by the term “institution” we wish to refer to the Husserlian concept of Stiftung and its original reworking by Merleau-Ponty during his 1954-55 course at the Collège de France: L’institution - La Passivité. We will therefore identify the concept of institution as a privileged way to describe our relationship with the Earth, understood as Boden [soil], envisaging in the instituting dynamic as something close to art. Finally, we will try to illustrate what Merleau-Ponty means by transcendental geology, namely the capacity to grasp the original relationship between space and time and a new way of conceptualizing the Earth as a.