In April 1994, two as-yet-unreleased letters by Sartre and one by Merleau-Ponty were published in the Magazine Littéraire. Their publication sparked new interpretative hypotheses on the political and philosophical motivations behind the break of the relationship of mutual esteem, friendship, and fruitful intellectual collaboration between Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. The bright tone of their personal contrasts testified the profound theoretical differences between the two thinkers, both at philosophical level and political praxis.
This volume covers the period between the launch of the magazine Les Temps Moderns in 1945, and Sartre’s decision to no longer accept Merleau-Ponty’s contributions in 1953, offering a detailed analysis of the respective position of the two philosophers and of an irreducible intellectual distance between them.
Daniela Calabrò is Associate Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Salerno, where she also teaches Theoretical Philosophy and Philosophical Theories of Mind-Body Relation. She is author of several books, including L’infanzia della filosofia. Saggio sulla filosofia dell’educazione di Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Torino 2002), Di-spiegamenti. Soggetto, corpo e comunità in Jean- Luc Nancy (Milano 2006), Les détours d’une pensée vivante. Transitions et changements de paradigme dans la réflexion de Roberto Esposito (Paris 2012), L’ora meridiana. Il pensiero inoperoso di Jean-Luc Nancy tra ontologia, estetica e politica (Milano 2012), Unlimit. Rethinking the boundaries between Philosophy, Aesthetics and Arts (with G. Bird and D. Giugliano), Preface by Jean-Luc Nancy (Milan 2017).