Abstract
Few concerns play as central a role in the evolution of Merleau-Ponty’s thought as the problem of expression. His inquiries took him beyond linguistics and aesthetics to grapple with questions that were basic to his studies of politics, society, and history. He hoped that by turning to the models suggested by linguistics and aesthetics he could acquire the categories needed to understand the social world and thus bring to completion the project he had begun with The Structure of Behaviour and the Phenomenology of Perception. But his attempt to elaborate a theory of expression ultimately led him to question the standpoint he had adopted in his first two books and thus to submit his entire project to radical criticism.
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Notes
PrP, p. 25.
PrP, pp. 12–13.
PrP, p. 11.
SNS, p. 94, ft. 13.
PrP, pp. 7–9.
PrP, p. 9.
Husserl’s essay was, as noted above, first published in the 1939 issue of the Revue internationale de philosophie devoted to Husserl. It has been translated as an appendix to the Crisis (pp. 353–78).
Crisis, pp. 354–5, 377–8.
PW, p. xvi.
Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, trans. B. Frechtman (New York: Harper & Row, 1965) p. 2.
Ibid., pp. 6–7.
Ibid, pp. 7, 9, 3–4. For discussions of Sartre’s argument, see Joseph P. Fell, Heidegger and Sartre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979) pp. 268–301; Aronson, pp. 122–53. and LaCapra, pp. 63–91.
Kurt Goldstein, ‘L’Analyse de l’aphasie et l’etude de l’essence du langage’, Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique, 30 (1933) pp. 430–96; Kurt Goldstein and Adhémar Gelb, ‘Uber Farbennamenamnesie’, Psychologische Forschung, 6 (1924) pp. 127–86; and Roman Jakobson, Child Language, Aphasia, and Phonological Universals, trans. A. R. Keiler (The Hague: Mouton, 1968).
Wallon, Les origines; Guillaume, Imitation in Children; and Jean Piaget, The Language and Thought of the Child, trans. M. and R. Gabain (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1932). Piaget, it should be mentioned, succeeded Merleau-Ponty at the Sorbonne and has recalled that when he corrected his first set of examinations ‘some candidates, not noticing that the professor had changed, explained that Piaget had understood nothing whatever, “as M. Merleau-Ponty has demonstrated” ’. See Piaget, Insights and Illusions of Philosophy, trans. W. Mays (New York: Meridian, 1971) p. 24. For Gustave Guillaume, see L’architectonique du temps dans les langues classique (Copenhagen, 1945).
Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, p. 24.
The most accessible general introduction to Saussure’s work is Jonathan Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).
Stephen H. Watson, ‘Merleau-Ponty’s Involvement with Saussure’, in Hugh J. Silverman (ed.), Continental Philosophy in America (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1983) suggests that Merleau-Ponty was aware of Saussure’s work as early as 1935 when he assisted Aron Gurwitsch on his article ‘Psychologie de langage’, Revue Philosophique de la France et de ΓEtranger, LXX (1935) pp. 399–439. Gurwitsch makes, however, only a passing reference to Saussure in a discussion of the work of M. K. Bühler (see p. 402). Watson further suggests that Merleau-Ponty ‘probably’ was making reference to Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole in his discussion of expression in the Phenomenology of Perception (p. 196), but Merleau-Ponty garbles the distinction slightly, producing an opposition of ‘parole’ and ‘langages’. Watson does not feel that Merleau-Ponty addresses Saussure’s work ‘in its specificity’ until his 1949–50 course on Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language. See Watson, pp. 209–12.
Watson, p. 212.
‘The Metaphysical in Man’, in SMS, esp. pp. 86–8; PW, pp. 22–46 and ff.
IPP, pp. 54–8.
TFL, pp. 5, 19–20.
SNS, pp. 86, 87; CAL, p. 97; PW, p. 23.
PW, p. 38.
PW, p. 23.
Culler, p. 4, quoting Saussure’s letter of 4 January 1894 to Meillet.
IPP, p. 55.
Ibid.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. W. Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966). The Course is a compilation of Saussure’s lectures from 1906–7, 1908–9, and 1910–11 edited by his students, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye in 1915. Their choice and ordering of materials has been the subject of much recent discussion. For a critical edition of the Course, with helpful notes, see Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, édition critique préparée par Tullio de Mauro (Paris: Payot, 1972).
For a discussion of the various ways Saussure posed the distinction and the various ways it can be translated, see de Mauro’s note, Cours, pp. 419–27.
Course, p. 9.
Course, pp. 18–19, 33; see Baskin’s note, Course, p. 32, for a discussion of Saussure’s peculiar use of the term ‘phonology’.
Course, p. 98.
Course, p. 87.
Course, p. 19.
For a discussion of the methodological implications of Saussure’s distinction, see Barthes, pp. 13–34.
Course, p. 79; de Mauro notes that the discussions Saussure seems to have been alluding to here were those of Menger and Schmoller (Cours, p. 451). For a critique of Saussure’s distinction which takes Marx’s critique of political economy as its model, see Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. C. Levin (St Louis: Telos Press, 1981) pp. 143–63.
Course, pp. 81, 90.
James Edie, for example, offers an intelligent defence of Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation which explains everything except how Merleau-Ponty worked himself into a position where he needed such a complex argument to bail him out. Granting that the object of synchronic linguistics is of course ‘the “form” or “system” of the present state of a given language and not the speech act itself’, Edie goes on to insist that this object, nevertheless, is ‘nothing other than the presently given, incubating and changing structure of the sum total of all presently recognized acts of speaking that take place within a given community’ and hence that synchronic linguistics might well be said to be ‘nothing but the description of the structure of these acts’: see James M. Edie, Speaking and Meaning: The Phenomenology of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976) p. 219, ft.55. But did Saussure in fact see the structure of a community’s speech acts as ‘incubating and changing’? Wasn’t he concerned to stress that while what is said in speech acts varies enormously, the basic structure of a language, the social fact which allows speakers to understand one another, varies only gradually over time and never as a result of innovations intentionally introduced by speakers? We might well say that the concern of synchronic linguistics lies with the structure underlying individual speech acts, but that structure is precisely what Saussure denotes as langue. Gary Brent Madison’s explanation of how Merleau-Ponty came to identify synchrony with parole and diachrony with langue is a good deal simpler: Merleau-Ponty ‘confused’ Saussure’s arguments with von Watburg’s (Madison, p. 322, ft.1). It is difficult to believe that Merleau-Ponty would be this confused in the early 1950s after having taught several courses on Saussure. Watson offers a more convincing explanation, suggesting that Merleau-Ponty might have been seeking to follow up on Saussure’s own argument that ‘everything diachronic in language is diachronic only by virtue of speaking. It is in speaking that the germ of all change is found’ (Course, p. 98). Watson, however, does not develop the argument very far (see Watson, pp. 219–20).
TFL, pp. 19–20.
Course, pp. 65–7.
Course, p. 112.
Maurice Lagueux, ‘Merleau-Ponty et la linguistique de Saussure’, pp. 357, 361.
Ibid, pp. 362–3.
Roland Barthes, ‘The Imagination of the Sign’, in Barthes, Critical Essays, trans. R. Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972) p. 205.
Ibid., p. 207.
Ibid, pp. 206–8; for an example of this type of approach, see Paul Ricoeur’s contrasting of the work of M.-D. Chenu with that of Lévi-Strauss, in The Conflict of Interpretations, pp. 54–61.
Saussure, pp. 67–70; see the critique of Saussure’s more extended argument in Emile Benveniste’s famous essay ‘The Nature of the Linguistic Sign’, in Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. M. E. Meek (Coral Gabels: University of Miami Press, 1971) pp. 43–8.
Barthes, Critical Essays, pp. 207–9.
Ibid, p. 210.
Ibid, p. 209.
Lagueux, p. 361.
Barthes, Critical Essays, p. 210.
Ibid, p. 208.
PP, p. 174.
PP, pp. 193, 136, 157, 168–9.
PP, p. l97.
Ibid.
PP, p. 183.
PP, pp. 183, 193.
PP, p. 185.
PP, p. 405.
PP, p. 193.
Ibid.
PP, p. 177; see also PP, p. 212.
PP, p. 430; see also PP, p. 253, ‘the very significance of the object… must be linked to its orientation, as indeed is indicated by the double usage of the French word sens’.
PP, p. 176.
PP, p. 114.
PP, p. 429.
Ibid.
PP, pp. 185–6.
For an analysis of gestures which proceeds from a rather different set of assumptions, see Julia Kristeva, Semioticé: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969) pp. 90–112.
PP, pp. 186–7.
PP, pp. 196–7; it should again be noted that Saussure distinguishes between parole and langue and reserves the term langage to refer to the fusion of the two.
PP, p. 197.
Ibid.
PP, p. 184.
Ibid.
See Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 211–14.
PP, pp. 187–8.
PP, p. 187; cf. CAL, p. 81.
PrP, p. 7.
Ibid.
SNS, p. l9.
Ibid.
SNS, p. 21.
SNS, p. 32.
SNS, pp. 37, 40.
SNS, pp. 3–4.
Η&, pp. 62, 7–12, 15.
H&T, pp. 52, 55, 62–3.
H&T, p. 40.
H&T, p. 100; cf. Koestler, Darkness at Noon, trans. D. Hardy (New York: Modern Library, 1941) pp. 82–3.
H&T, p. 55.
H&T, pp. 95, 65–6.
H&T, p. 41.
H&T, pp. 61–2.
Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1975) pp. 359–63.
See Roy A. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, trans. C. Taylor (New York: Vintage, 1973) pp. 349–54, 464–5.
Cohen, pp. 373–4.
Cohen, p. 377; see also his meticulous analysis of Bukharin’s testimony, pp. 377–80; for the arrest of Bukharin’s wife and his son, see p. 375. They were released twenty years after his execution.
PP, p. 448.
PP, pp. 448–9.
PP, p. 450.
For an earlier discussion of Marx’s philosophy of history, see ‘Concerning Marxism’, in SNS, pp. 99–124.
H&T, p. 108.
H&T, p. 110.
H&T, p. 153.
H&T, pp. 129–30.
H&T, p. 153.
H&T, pp. 155–6.
H&T, p. 126.
SNS, p. 121.
SNS, pp. 121–2.
H&T, pp. l18–9.
AD, pp. 230–2.
PP, p. 450.
Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, pp. 29–30; Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. R. Livingston (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971) pp. 121, 142, 147, 159.
For a discussion of these tensions, see James Miller, History and Human Existence: From Marx to Merleau-Ponty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979) pp. 207–19.
IPP, p. 50.
Ibid.
IPP, p. 51.
IPP, pp. 53–4.
IPP, pp. 55–6.
CAL, p. 102.
IPP, p. 56.
IPP, p. 54.
PrP, p. 9.
Lefort, ‘Editor’s Preface’ to PW, p. xxiv; see also the anticipations of these discussions in PW, pp. 83–4, 112–13.
PW, pp. 3–6.
PW, pp. 31–3, 36.
PW, pp. 43, 36.
See the discussion of Sartre in PW, pp. 61–2.
The relationship of ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’ to The Prose of the World is as follows. The essay begins with a long section on signs which is essentially a summary of the second chapter of The Prose of the World (cf. S, pp. 39–44 and PW, pp. 22–43). This is followed by a discussion of Malraux’s writings on painting (5, pp. 45–76) which is taken, with only a few stylistic modifications, from the book (see PW, pp. 43–88). This, in turn, is followed by a discussion of the parallels between writing and painting (5, pp. 76–82) which is taken, with considerable editing, from PW, pp. 89–113. One section not taken over into ‘Indirect Language’, a discussion of problems in the writing of histories of philosophy (with particular reference to Descartes), bears a certain resemblance to Merleau-Ponty’s later essay on the problem of treating philosophers historically: ‘Everywhere and Nowhere’ (cf. PW, pp. 91–9 and S, pp. 126–33, 147–52).
PW, pp. 123–4; see also the summary in PrP, p. 8.
The most important aspects of this discussion have been analysed above in Chapter 3.
PW, pp. 147–52; Merleau-Ponty had discussed the parallels between drawing and language acquisition in CAL, pp. 11 and 61.
PW, p. 148.
TFL, pp. 27–38; see Métraux’s notes in Vorlesungen, pp. 284–5, for a discussion of the relationship of the course to Merleau-Ponty’s earlier writings.
Kruks ignores the book altogether, as does Cooper. Spurling’s discussion of language is confined almost exclusively to the Phenomenology of Perception (pp. 48–75) and Rahil’s work was published before The Prose of the World was available. There is a suggestive discussion of the relation between Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘instruction’ and his philosophy of expression in O’Neill, pp. 46–64, which draws on ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’.
PW, p. 31; cf. pp. 33, 115 and CAL, pp. 28–9.
PW, pp. 6–7.
PW, p. 115.
Ibid.
PW, p. 32.
PW, pp. 31–2; 116.
S, p. 39.
S, pp. 41–2; cf. CAL, p. 92.
5, pp. 44–5; PW, p. 144.
PW, p. 31.
PW, p. 115.
PW, p. 37.
S, pp. 54–5, 75–6; PW, pp. 60–1, 87–8.
S, p. 55; PW, p. 61.
S, p. 81; PW, p. 103.
For a discussion of the treatment of questions of reference in structuralist approaches to language, see Paul Ricoeur, ‘Structure, Word, Event’, in The Conflict of Interpretations, pp. 84–5.
By ‘object’, Saussure meant the telos towards which a science moves, as opposed to the ‘material’ which a number of sciences can share; see de Mauro’s note, Cours, pp. 414–5.
CAL, p. 101.
PW, p. 83.
AD, p. 19; see the parallel discussion in ‘Everywhere and Nowhere’, S, pp. 126–7.
4D, pp. 3–4.
S, p. 73; PW, p. 85.
Barthes, Elements of Semiology, pp. 23–5 (the discussion, however, misses the point of Merleau-Ponty’s use of the concept of ‘advent’ and presents him as simply reiterating the distinction between structure and event); and Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations, pp. 86–8.
Fernand Braudel, On History, trans. S. Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) pp. 27–34, 74–6.
S, pp. 60–2, 68–70; PW, pp. 71–2, 80–3.
Ricoeur, Objectivity and Subjectivity in History’, in History and Truth, pp. 33–6. The essay dates from 1952; Merleau-Ponty attributes the notion to Ricoeur in ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’ but does not cite the article itself.
Crisis, p. 354.
Ibid, pp. 354, 359.
S, p. 59; PW, p. 68. The term is defined (‘fondation ou éstablissement’) only in ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’. The words ‘foundation, institution’ which follow the German term in PW, p. 68, have been added by the translator.
PW, p. 72.
S, p. 60; PW, p. 72.
PW, p. 23.
PW, pp. 23, 36 (both are marginal notes to the text).
S, p. 61; PW, p. 71.
5, p. 64.
S, p. 61; PW, p. 71.
AD, pp. 16–17.
Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Weber’s account of rationalisation was guided by Karl Löwith’s great 1932 essay, Max Weber and Karl Marx, trans. H. Fantel (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982).
AD, p. 17.
Ibid.
AD, p. 16.
AD, p. ll; cf. the discussions of Weber in Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, pp. 31–8; 234–6.
Weber, Economy and Society, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) pp. 3–26. It is this discussion which serves as the basis for Schutz’s analysis.
AD, pp. 13–14.
AD, p. 13; cf. Schutz, Phenomenology, pp. 224–9.
S, p. 119.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. T. Parsons (New York: Scribner, 1958) p. 175; see AD, p. 15. Weber’s footnote to the Wesley quotation is worth noting as it bears out Merleau-Ponty’s reading rather nicely: ‘The reading of this passage may be recommended to all those who consider themselves today better informed on these matters than the leaders and contemporaries of the movements themselves. As we see, they knew very well what they were doing and what dangers they faced’: Weber, Protestant Ethic, p. 280. See also Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Lucien Febvre’s study of Rabelais in SNS, p. 92, for a similar argument.
AD, p. 28.
AD, p. 16.
AD, p. 24.
AD, p. 23.
PW, p. 148.
AD, p. 3.
Ibid.
AD, pp. 30–31.
Paul Breines and Andrew Arato described Adventures of the Dialectic as ‘the most lucid brief commentary on History and Class Consciousness’. See The Young Lukàcs and the Origins of Western Marxism (New York: Seabury, 1979) p. 220.
The earliest citation of History and Class Consciousness comes in an article from 1946 (SNS, p. 126) but it is likely that he read the book much earlier. In the same year, he and Lukács were present at the Recontre Internationales de Genève, although at this point Lukács had renounced his earlier work and devoted his talk to a critique of ‘irrational’ and ‘aristocratic’ doctrines such as the writings of Nietzsche and Spengler, which brought on a series of exchanges with Karl Jaspers; Merleau-Ponty, who had delivered a talk at the meetings which stressed the importance of Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences for a renovation of the concept of reason, responded to the Lukács-Jaspers exchange with an attempt to recall certain of the dimensions of voluntarism and contingency which had stood at the centre of Lukács’s 1923 discussion of Marx; see VEsprit européen. Recontres internationales de Genève (Neuchátel: Editions de la Baconniére, 1947) pp. 74–7, 252–6. See also Merleau-Ponty’s 1949 note on one of Lukács’s many self-criticisms and disavowals of his earlier work, reprinted in S, pp. 261–2.
AD, p. 30; for Lukács’s own account, see ‘Mein Weg zur Marx’, in Lukács, Schriften zur Ideologie und Politik (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1967).
AD, pp. 30, 21.
AD, p. 30.
AD, pp. 30–1.
AD, p. 31.
AD, p. 32.
AD, pp. 35–6; in the passages that follow I have retained Merleau-Ponty’s own translation of the German as ’devenir-société de la société’. Merleau-Ponty’s English translator employs a translation based on the German: ‘the socialization of society’.
AD, p. 37.
Ibid.
AD, p. 38.
AD, pp. 38, 57.
AD, p. 44.
Ibid.
AD, p. 45.
AD, p. 47.
AD, p. 50.
AD, p. 51.
AD, pp. 51–3.
AD, p. 57; for a discussion of the fate of the book, see Arato and Breines, pp. 163–89.
AD, p. 60.
AD, pp. 61–2.
AD, p. 62.
Ibid.
AD, p. 63.
AD, p. 64.
For the relation of the two books, see Arato and Breines, pp. 170–5.
AD, p. 64.
Ibid.
AD, p. 66.
AD, pp. 64–5.
AD, p. 221.
AD, pp. 72–3.
AD, p. 90.
AD, p. 221.
AD, p. 207.
See the Introduction to Signs: ‘Man is hidden, well hidden, and this time we must make no mistake about it: this does not mean that he is there beneath the mask, ready to appear … there are no faces underneath the masks, historical man has never been human, and yet no man is alone’ (S, pp. 33–4).
AD, p. 227.
AD, p. 226.
S, p. 178.
S, p. 84.
PW, p. 148.
S, p. 70; PW, p. 83.
See the qualifying statements in the text and the marginal note in PW, pp. 80–1.
S, p. 70.
S, p. 67; PW, p. 78; PW, pp. 18, 123.
PP, p. 402.
PP, p. 403.
Ibid.
See Stephen Watson, ‘Pretexts: Language, Perception, and the Cogito in Merleau-Ponty’s Thought’, in Sallis (ed.), Merleau-Ponty: Perception, Structure, Language, pp. 149, 153; see alsoPP, p. 153.
VI, p. 171.
VI, p. 179.
VI, pp. 171, 179.
VI, p. l79.
VI, p. 176.
VI, p. 201.
Ibid.
Ibid.
VI, p. 145.
VI, p. 153.
VI, p. 155.
Ibid.
VI, pp. 154–5.
VI, p. 126.
VI, p. 224.
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Schmidt, J. (1985). Speech, Expression, and the Sense of History. In: Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Theoretical Traditions in the Social Sciences. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17869-8_4
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