Mauro Carbone

Italian philosopher (b. 1956) working primarily in French; specialist in Merleau-Ponty's aesthetics and ontology, and in the philosophical significance of cinema and digital screens. Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France; Professor of Philosophy at Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3. Among the most influential contemporary readers of MP's late ontology — especially its engagement with Proust, painting, and cinema — and the coiner of the technical neologism *arche-screen*.

Key Points

  • Merleau-Ponty scholar of the aesthetic ontology: Carbone's distinctive contribution is the systematic reading of MP through the "three readings of Vinteuil" (see sensible-ideas) and through MP's cinema writings. He treats MP's aesthetics as a central — not peripheral — site of MP's ontological project.
  • Coiner of the arche-screen: in Philosophy-Screens (2016/2019), Carbone introduces the arche-screen as the transhistorical apparatus of showing-and-concealing images, arguing that the screen (and not the window) is the optical apparatus of our epoch.
  • Program of philosophy-cinema / philosophy-screens: Carbone re-opens Deleuze's 1974 coinage of "philosophy-cinema" as a task that has not been performed — including by Deleuze himself — and proposes philosophy-screens as its today-scale version.
  • Archival contribution: With Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, Carbone has worked on MP's unpublished manuscripts, especially tracking the emergence of the term precession in the 1957–60 period (reading notes on Arnheim; replacement of enjambement / empiétement; the Grand Résumé of V&I). See precession.
  • Lyon school: directed a group of philosophers working on MP and aesthetics (Jacopo Bodini, Francesco Caddeo, Stanislas de Courville, Anna Caterina Dalmasso, Lucia Lo Marco, Marta Nijhuis) whose collective work forms a distinct strand of contemporary MP scholarship focused on image and media.

Principal Works (on the wiki)

  • 1990: La visibilità dell'invisibile — early work on MP, painting, and the visible/invisible distinction.
  • 2004: The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Ponty's A-Philosophy (Northwestern). The foundational anchor on the wiki for the a-philosophy framing of MP's late project, and for the gnoseological reading of voyance (predating Flesh of Images by 7 years and Carbone 2019 by 15 years). Four interrupted dialogues (Husserl-Proust on time, Hegel on the idea of philosophy, Uexküll-Proust-Rimbaud on nature and ideas, Heidegger and Kant on letting-be) converge on the chiasm-as-formula of the "mutation of the relationship between humanity and Being." Closes with the conceptus-as-hollow philological argument (Latin conceptus / concavity vs German Begriff / grasping) — the etymological key to "open the concept without destroying it." Ch 4 is the title chapter, originally published in Evans-Lawlor Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty's Notion of Flesh (SUNY 2000).
  • 2011 (French) / 2015 (English): The Flesh of Images: Merleau-Ponty Between Painting and Cinema — first sustained treatment of MP's cinema writings; precursor of Philosophy-Screens. Ch. 2 of Philosophy-Screens "enriches and develops" a similarly-titled chapter from this book. The primary archival source for the genealogy of precession (1957 Arnheim notes → 1960 E&M drafts → Fall 1960 Grand Résumé) that PS 2019 later summarizes. Also introduces voyance, light-of-the-flesh, making-visible; develops the Gauguin deconstruction-of-Christian-flesh argument that answers Derrida's 2000 critique of "flesh of the world."
  • 2013: Être morts ensemble: l'événement du 11 septembre 2001 — philosophy and 9/11 as media-event; precursor of Philosophy-Screens ch. 6.
  • 2016 / 2019: Philosophie-écrans / Philosophy-Screens: From Cinema to the Digital Revolution (trans. Marta Nijhuis) — central programmatic work of the "philosophy-screens" project.
  • 2019: contributor to Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy (ed. Alloa, Chouraqui, Kaushik) — where he develops the "clouded surface" / sensible-ideas reading.
  • 2020: co-editor (with Galen A. Johnson and Emmanuel de Saint Aubert) of Merleau-Ponty's Poetic of the World — his chapter on the three readings of Vinteuil is a key source for sensible-ideas.
  • 2022: Philosophy-Screens in the Age of Catastrophes (forthcoming / projected).

Intellectual Network

Present and declared in the Acknowledgments to Philosophy-Screens:

  • Lyon school (students / collaborators): Marta Nijhuis, Jacopo Bodini, Francesco Caddeo, Stanislas de Courville, Anna Caterina Dalmasso, Lucia Lo Marco.
  • Senior interlocutors / sponsors at IUF: Renaud Barbaras, Vivian Sobchack.
  • Collaborators and ongoing exchange: Emmanuel Alloa, Gabriela Basterra, Giovanna Borradori, Francesco Casetti, Michele Cometa, Jean-Pierre Esquenazi, Vittorio Gallese, Richard Grusin, Galen Johnson, W. J. T. Mitchell, Pietro Montani, Andrea Pinotti, Pierre Rodrigo, Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, Antonio Somaini, Bernard Stiegler, Luc Vancheri.
  • Scholars who engaged with the work: Arthur Cools, Roberto De Gaetano, Élie During, Ericson Falabretti, Arild Fetveit, Amy Foley, Jean-Baptiste Joinet, Rajiv Kaushik, José Manuel Martins, Marcos José Müller, Peter Reynaert, Jim Risser, Alejandro Vallega, Daniela Vallega-Neu.

Critical Reception

  • Frank Chouraqui's *Order of the Earth* cites Carbone's reading of precession (fn. 24) but diverges by centering precession on the Husserlian earth-text rather than (as Carbone does) on the MP-Eye-and-Mind passage on vision. The two readings are complementary rather than competing.
  • Rajiv Kaushik (kaushik-2019-matrixed-ontology) draws on Carbone's aesthetic-ontological reading of MP but develops the symbolic-matrix framing in different directions.

Connections

Sources