La spazialità dell'idea sensibile Merleau-Ponty e Proust in dialogo tra filosofia e letteratura

The objective of this essay is to investigate an intersection between the philosophical works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Marcel Proust’s Recherche: through the sensitive idea, this text aims to consider the qualities of a peculiar space originated by literary language. Literature has the power of dis-locating and de-forming the reader, thereby exposing a new spatiality, a dimension that simultaneously exists here and elsewhere. Through this dialogue, the article examines the chiasmatic nature of aesthetic experience, which is now sensitive, now ideal. Central to understanding this chiasm is Merleau-Ponty’s argument regarding pre-predicative and sensitive experience, which he develops by referring to many episodes of the Recherche. By analysing the experience of literature, this article suggests it is possible to observe a spatial operativity of the sensitive idea. Put down in writing, in fact, the latter emerges as a vehicle for something that is both carnal and ideal. This paper thus questions the operativity of literature, not only as a means for content, but as an agent that transforms experience, capable of engendering new modes of interaction between the subject and the world.