Does Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology have anything to offer in a time of ‘democratic, social, economic and environmental instability’? Guillaume Le Blanc, the editor of a dossier in Esprit 3/2025 on the twentieth-century French philosopher, believes he does. In the philosophical...
I remember exactly what I was doing on the morning of 21 August 1968, when Russian tanks invaded Czechoslovakia. I was eleven years old, spending the summer in a cottage with my parents. From the hilltop I watched the column...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPSgT7BJNlY Groundwater supplies 65 % of the drinking water used in the EU. Europe has a great average performance when it comes to water infrastructures, and much of the continent is geographically lucky to have access to this resource. But...
‘I want to come to you and be silent for a minute or two.’ In the fourth of Hugues C. Pernath’s index poems from his 1973 collection My Countervoice, time is not just an expression of desire. Lines such as...
In its latest issue, Flemish–Belgian journal rekto:verso delves into the politics and aesthetics of fitness. From strength training and bodybuilding to pole dancing and yoga, it examines how fitness practices both reinforce neoliberal values and dominant beauty standards, as well...
Belgian journal La Revue nouvelle offers insights into the conflicts in Middle East. ‘Neutrality is neither possible nor desirable’, says the journal, but we can try to ‘better understand the context that produced these events’. In a dossier entitled ‘Moyen-Orient...
My own body had begun to interest me in a new way… Those infamous doses of endorphins would surge through my limbs… This, finally, meant truly living in the body, enjoying movement. (Catriona Menzies-Pike) As befits a self-proclaimed intellectual, physical...
War tells many stories, and this is one of them. On 5 April 2025, artist and soldier Marharyta Polovinko was killed while serving on the frontline of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. She was 31 years old. Her death is...
‘You want content verifiers working with us? The media represent the biggest bunch of hypocrites you can imagine. Journalists don’t need fact checking, they need moral backbone!’ Iwona’s critique may be strong, but it isn’t spurious; she used to work...
I wanna look like what I am but don’t know what someone like me looks like. I mean, when people look at me, I want them to think “there’s one of those people that has their own interpretation of happiness”....
