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In this chapter, Anna Caterina Dalmasso proposes an analysis on the way this television series sheds light on the fact that human beings and technology are intrinsically entangled and mutually constituted. As pointed out by the author, technicity shall be thought of not as something that is merely added onto the natural core of embodied life, but as the very structure of the relationship between human beings and the environment. Thus, through “The Entire History of You,” “Striking Vipers,” and “San Junipero” this chapter analyzes the way digital prostheses contribute to informing and reconfiguring our bodily and embodied engagement with the world. The essay also suggests an inquiry into the experience of inhabiting an avatar as acting like a prosthetic virtual body and analyzes the fantasies of disembodiment raised by the prospects of singularity and consciousness uploading as questioned by “San Junipero,” in particular.

A plusieurs reprises, Merleau-Ponty tisse une correspondance entre art et histoire, entre pratique artistique et action politique : plus precisement il nous invite a former le concept d’histoire sur l’exemple de l’art. A premiere vue, un tel rapprochement pourrait paraitre abstrait, sinon provocateur, l’art etant souvent concu comme un domaine qui semble avoir peu a faire avec l’espace de l’action. Mais, nous pouvons aujourd’hui comprendre davantage l’interet de l’intuition merleau-pontienne, nous, qui faisons l’experience de la connexion etroite entre l’univers visuel et le milieu politique ou historique, comme des dimensions devenues desormais inseparables. Au fur et a mesure qu’une conception positiviste de l’histoire ou de la politique entendue comme progres, ou du moins comme projet, echoue sous nos yeux interdits, la question de l’historicite se fait de plus en plus urgente : Merleau-Ponty nous invite a penser l’histoire comme le « lieu de nos interrogations et de nos etonnements », le lieu d’une reponse, voire d’une responsabilite que nos organismes technologiques exigent. C’est a partir de l’experience de la creation artistique et de son rapport constitutif au hasard qu’une pensee de l’historicite peut s’elaborer, la ou l’esthetique merleau-pontienne rejoint le mystere d’un sens historique et esquisse implicitement une ethique de la contingence, en ce qu’elle nous appelle a un exercice de la liberte. Abstract Anna Caterina Dalmasso The Artist and the Adversity. Chance and Creation in Merleau-Ponty Throughout his works, Merleau-Ponty has developed the analogy between art and history, between art practice and political action: more precisely he invites us to think about the concept of history on the example of art. At first sight, such an equivalence could seem abstract, if not provocative, insofar as art is still sometimes regarded as a field having little to share with action. But today, experiencing the close connection between the visual and the political environment, we can understand, perhaps better than his contemporaries, what is at stake in Merleau-Ponty’s insight for a new comprehension of history. Whereas a positivist conception of history and politics understood as progress or project seems to be failing before our astonished eyes, the question of historicity becomes more and more urgent: Merleau-Ponty prompts us to think of history as a mysterious junction between facticity and intention, as the beginning of our wonder, as the place of the responsibility that our technological organisms demand. The experience of creation is the figure through which Merleau-Ponty tries to conceive contingency, which is the kernel of the Geneva conference, later called The Man and the Adversity. So, drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s constant reference to the operation of artistic creation, especially on the reference to El Greco, I aim at examining how a new conception of history can spring by a comprehension of the experience of creation. I will argue that, from the analysis of the relationship between the artist and the sensible, between the artist and her body, Merleau-Ponty comes to outline what I would call an ethics of contingency, insofar as it calls us to the exercise of our freedom.

Il riquadro dello schermo disegna una separazione, un taglio ontologico e semiotico tra lo spazio reale e la vista che è contenuta in tale apertura. Sebbene tale confine dell’immagine derivi dalla tradizione della rappresentazione pittorica, la superficie dello schermo ne accentua alcuni aspetti costituendosi come una struttura di sconfinamento, che viene dunque a mettere in discussione l’esistenza dei suoi propri limiti interni. A partire da alcuni riferimenti alla nozione di schermo presenti nell’opera di Merleau-Ponty, vorrei descrivere ed interrogare i caratteri specifici del limite che lo schermo es-pone ed im-pone alla superficie. Mi propongo allora di mostrare come la superficie dello schermo, inteso ad un tempo come dispositivo ottico e concettuale, può essere pensata come una figura topologica, come una cavità, un rilievo o una piega, piuttosto che ciò che funge da contorno o cornice della visione. The screen’s frame outlines a separation, an ontological and semiotic cut between the real space and the view contained within its aperture. While it inherits such a border from the tradition of pictorial representation, the screen’s surface constitute itself as an overlapping structure that encroaches and puts into question the existence of its own boundaries. Drawing on some references to the notion of “screen” in Merleau-Ponty’s work, I would like to delineate and interrogate the peculiar nature of the borders that the screens ex-pose and im-pose to its surface. Addressing the notion of screen, as both an optical and conceptual apparatus, I aim at describing the way the “screen” and its “surface” can be thought as a topological figure, more as a cavity, a relief or fold, than as a frame of vision.

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The Depth of Vision: Movement, Depth, and Cinema in The Sensible World and the World of Expression Is it possible to establish a connection between The Sensible World and the World of Expression and the fi nal thought of Merleau-Ponty? In what manner would a germinal formulation of ontological refl ection be present in the 1953 course? And what are the elements of contact and convergence that allow us to tracing out such a link? I intend to put forward this hypothesis from a consideration of the theme of vision in its relation to movement, sketching the points in which this link emerges and shows itself, both in a latent and a manifest way. I would like to show, in the development of this course, on the one hand, how movement is defi ned in its ontological value and comes to express the very relation which links the perceiving body and the perceived world, and, on the other hand, how, as the theme of optical experience happens to bring to light the relation between perception and expression in order to unveil its chiasmatic character. If the research conducted by Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception had delimited the relation of inherence and co-implication between the perceiving and the perceived, the course notes of Sensible World and the World of Expression come to designate a "double movement" between sense and the sensible, or, a "reciprocal" or "bi-directional" movement of expression and encroachment one another, in which we can catch a glimpse of a prefi guration of the chiasmatic and reversible relation which links the seer and the visible in the Merleau-Ponty's ontology of the flesh. There is a web which links the 1953 course with the refl ection of the fi nal Merleau-Ponty, particularly with Eye and Mind. I have again gone through the three modes, or rather the three movements of vision which emerge in a germinal state in the course notes. - The theme of vision in depth as the discovery of an active-passive relation between the seer and the visible, linked to the optical dimension as the opening to the link between vision and desire. - The notion of the spiritual eye that Merleau-Ponty takes from Paul Schilder, as the key concept for the conception of vision in Eye and Mind, which in addition represents a fundamental link between optical experience and the libidinal conception of one's own body, which is profoundly in sync with the role of scopic impulse in Lacan. - The theme of movement in fi lm as the culminating point of these references to vision, to the depth, to the being in relief or depth perception, which will emerge in some distant years, with painting, in Eye and Mind and in the course on Cartesian Ontology and Ontology Today.

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