Deadline: June 2, 2025
The editorial board of the philosophical journal «Il Pensiero» selects original contributions in the form of essays and reviews for the issue dedicated to the topic:
Political Merleau-Ponty
The deadline for submission of contributions is June 2, 2025; the response will be communicated by the editors possibly by September 5, 2025. Submissions will not have to exceed 45.000 characters, including spaces and footnotes, and have to be accompanied by an abstract in Italian and in English, of maximum 1200 characters each, and 5 keywords (in Italian and English).
The issue is scheduled for release in November 2025.
Volume editor: Enrica Lisciani-Petrini – Università degli Studi di Salerno.
Claude Lefort, in the Editor’s Preface written for Merleau-Ponty’s first posthumous book, edited by him – La Prose du monde –, remembers that he, beyond his teaching more centred on philosophical issues, incessantly worked “in a completely different direction” reinterpreting Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and accumulating amazing material on the problems of politics. The two fields – the more philosophical and the more specifically political one – clearly were, in his thought, in a continuous reciprocal reverberation. The thing is not astonishing. Having lived, the first time as a child and the second as a mature adult, the two most devastating world wars in history and having believed, for a long period that goes up to the end of the 1940s, in the historical role of communism, he could not avoid questioning himself en philosopheupon the destiny of the new world order that emerged from those catastrophic experiences. Because all this called into question exactly Philosophy: that is the order that Europe was given moving precisely from a vision of things that was still “modern”, based on the conviction of the ideal primacy of reason. Hence his initial adhesion to catholic socialism and, subsequently, to Marxism. But distancing himself – initially passing to a “waiting Marxism” – when the disastrous news pertaining to the Stalinist regime starts coming, and then completely breaking off from it, when Merleau-Ponty realizes that even the Marxian conviction that there is “an immanent sense in history” is to be “called into question”.
So it is certainly not a coincidence if, exactly at this point of his reflection, in the early 1950s, the philosopher starts questioning himself on the problem of the “institution” as the keystone to pass from a “politics of conscience”, based on the notion of “constitution”, to a politics that is capable of deeply renewing itself. Thanks, precisely, to a reflection upon the notion of “institution”. Because, long from making you imagine that there can ever be a sense already given and acknowledged by man, it restarts from a more original terrain by which “both nature, man and history” are seen not as substances […] but as movements” within which man himself “is caught”. Which means: it is necessary to understand each time that sense comes (can be found) at the confluence point of a series of dynamics of which no one can take possession, but have to be handled in their chiasmatic and insoluble reciprocal intertwining
The newness of this thinking is there for all to see. Still today not only are we facing wars, but we are in a situation of a deep political vacuum, cause of which war solutions have even substituted politics. How necessary it is to go back to a “policy thought”, or to a reflection able to “think policy”, is therefore the urgency we are confronted with and the task to which we are called. Merleau-Ponty can help us. Or at least this is the conviction of whom is editing this paper. Although – and it is remarkable that, even for what we said at the beginning – this “side” of Merleau-Ponty’s reflection has not been adequately explored yet (differently from others). The intent we are aiming at – through research that studies in deep the problems the French philosopher dealt with and the answers that he tried to give – is thus that of bringing out the theoretical and political potentialities contained in his thought and their relevance.