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.

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.

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”.