The fold and the chiasm. Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze

We start from the question of how significant are the differences between the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Rather than emphasizing the similarities or dissimilarities between the two, we argue that between these thinkers there is a kind of "relay", in which Merleau-Ponty anticipates in his last writings certain possible developments of philosophical thought, some of which become actual in Deleuze's work (without ignoring, of course, the specific contexts in which their respective ideas arise). We will pay special attention to themes shared by these thinkers, such as their assessment of structuralism, their critique and transcendence of the "philosophy of conscience" (reflexive subjectivism), and their openness to an ontology of immanence, concrete and dynamic, centered on the notion of "life" (in the manner of Bergson) rather than on the notion of "Being" (in the manner of Heidegger).