Andrea Zoppis

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.

The essay tries to retrace the essential elements that constitute our amorous relationality starting from the work of Merleau-Ponty and Simondon. First of all, we will consider the Merleau-Pontian conception of the body as a fundamental structure that enables us to conceive of our sentimental life in embodied terms. Then, we will elucidate the meaning of the sensible ideas theorized by Merleau-Ponty on the basis of Proust’s work, with particular attention to the sentimental institution and the revaluation of the amorous imagination. It will then be possible to to consider Simondon’s work in order to retrace the meaning of the notions of emotion, affectivity and invention, in the attempt to understand the characteristics that contribute to the transindividual individuation of the couple. Finally, we will try to recompose our technological and digital experience from the point of view of our amorous experiences, focusing on the pervasiveness of screens and on the possibility of rethinking their status as transindividual mediators of our desire and sentimental life.