Mimesis International

Questo ventesimo numero di “Chiasmi” riporta alcuni importanti documenti inediti di Merleau-Ponty: il dialogo del ’46, che pone il problema dell’individuo nel dopoguerra; il primo testo su Heidegger; En un combat douteux, critico verso l’ipocrisia dei partiti politici; due interventi, in cui condensa la sua posizione su Husserl e tenta un accostamento tra fenomenologia e filosofia del linguaggio; e alcune lettere, di cui una alquanto commovente rivolta a Simone de Beauvoir.

This work is a study of current migration narratives within the disciplines of An-glophone Postcolonial Literature and Digital Humanities. Global culture, the pro-liferation and pervasiveness of telecommunications technologies and new media, particularly the Internet, have substantially affected the act of narrating. The re-placement of traditional written language as the primary means of conveying nar-rative and storytelling is a distinctive feature in: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013); Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (2017); Warsan Shire’s “Home” (2011, 2016, 2017, 2022) and the narratives produced within the “Refugee Tales” project. These literary and digital projects might well be considered avant-garde manifestos against racism, in favour of gender equality, female empowerment and a humanitarian plea for the compassionate treatment of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers.

This work explores the main elements of Merleau-Ponty’s humanism: corporei-ty, perception, intersubjectivity, and the historical and political dimension of his thought. Through these themes, it becomes clear that Merleau-Ponty’s humani-sm offers an original and profound response to fundamental questions about the human being, proposing a vision of the human that integrates body and mind, subject and object, self and other, and that reveals a new way of inhabiting the world: in a continuous and ever-emerging ‘diastole without systole.’ As Merleau-Ponty writes in In Praise of Philosophy: “The philosopher is the man who wakes up and speaks. And man contains silently within himself the paradoxes of philo-sophy, because to be completely a man, it is necessary to be a little more and a little less than man”.

Los Santos Plays Itself begins with a simple claim: the most obsessively filmed city in contemporary art may be a fake Los Angeles built by Rockstar Games. Taking its cue from Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself, the book asks what happens when video art and post-photographic practices run on a commercial game engine. If Andersen traced how cinema framed a city, this study follows how simulation gener-ates its own urban logic. Across more than seventy works made between 2013 and 2025, the book tracks artists who treat Grand Theft Auto V as software rather than a narrative. Their work exposes Los Santos as executable code: an apparatus in which ideology is encoded into traffic models, weather systems, and police routines. Machinima becomes a post-cinematic practice that scripts resistance into this procedural logic through am-bient observation, modding, and infrastructural critique.

Albert Piette chose to “note”, regretting that he was not an artist who could express “time”. As an anthropologist, he has transformed his fear of time into acts of noting that have become central to his own work. His father, his daughters’ childhoods, the moments of a day and his experience of a blocked nose are “noted”. The author’s main aim is to show how, on the basis of such daily notes on his own life, it is possible to carry out anthropology. In so doing, he debates with artists, philosophers and anthropologists. Above all, he offers a radically different perspective on anthropology as a theoretical reflection on the “resistance” of being – the absolute being – from which he draws out the elementary laws of functioning. The book concludes with proposals for an ethics of noting as an antidote to violence.