Speaking Speech and Spoken Speech

Merleau-Ponty's distinction in Part One Ch VI of Phenomenology of Perception between parole parlante (speaking speech, the act of creative expression) and parole parlée (spoken speech, the sedimented cultural world of available significations). The distinction is the 1945 version of what Signs and the 1954–55 courses will generalize into the broader theory of expression.

Key Points

  • Two modes of speech, not two languages: Speaking speech and spoken speech are not two different kinds of language but two modes of the same linguistic being-in-the-world. Speaking speech is the act; spoken speech is the sediment.
  • Speaking speech is where meaning is in a "nascent state": "In the former [speaking speech], the meaningful intention is in a nascent state. Here existence is polarized into a certain 'sense' that cannot be defined by any natural object; existence seeks to meet up with itself beyond being, and this is why it creates speech as the empirical support of its own non-being. Speech is the excess of our existence beyond natural being" (PhP, p. 237).
  • Spoken speech is the "acquired fortune" of available significations: "The act of expression constitutes a linguistic and cultural world, it makes that which stretched beyond fall back into being. This results in spoken speech, which enjoys the use of available significations like that of an acquired fortune. From these acquisitions, other authentic acts of expression — those of the writer, the artist, and the philosopher — become possible" (p. 237).
  • The distinction is grammatically active/passive: Parlante is the present participle — "speaking." Parlée is the past participle — "spoken." The grammar is the doctrine: one is active and creative, the other passive and inherited.
  • Language is continuous with gesture: The chapter's prior sections establish that "the linguistic gesture" is a species of bodily gesture; words are "ways of singing the world"; there are neither natural signs nor purely conventional signs. Speaking speech extends gestural expression; spoken speech sediments it.
  • Every act of speech draws on both: An authentic speaker uses the "acquired fortune" of spoken speech to articulate a new speaking speech. The writer, the artist, the philosopher all do this — they "create speech" while using the available significations that make the creation intelligible.

Details

The Argument Through Chapter VI

Part One Ch VI builds up to the distinction through a critique of both empiricist and intellectualist theories of aphasia. Neither can explain why words can lose their "living sense" without losing their "material support" — the patient repeats the word but cannot make it mean anything; conversely, patients can sometimes mean a color without having its name, and then the name "becomes their vehicle of access" to the meaning.

The negative result is that meaning is not in the word as a property of its physical substrate (empiricism) and is not associated to the word by pure thought (intellectualism). The positive proposal is that meaning inhabits the word as a linguistic gesture: the word, sounded out in a speaking body, is a modulation of existence that carries its sense with it. The body "sings the world" through the word.

The Distinction at the Chapter's Climax

Near the end of Ch VI, MP makes the distinction explicit:

By taking up a famous distinction, it might be said that languages [langages], that is, constituted systems of vocabulary and syntax, or the various empirically existing "means of expression," are the depository and the sedimentation of acts of speech [parole], in which the unformulated sense not only finds the means of expressing itself on the outside, but moreover acquires existence for itself, and is truly created as sense. Or again, the distinction could be made between a speaking speech and a spoken speech. (PhP, p. 237)

The "famous distinction" MP refers to is Saussure's langue (language as a constituted system) and parole (an individual act of speech). But MP transforms the distinction. For Saussure, langue and parole are different objects of linguistic analysis — langue is a social system, parole is an individual performance. For MP, parole parlante and parole parlée are not two objects; they are two modes of the single phenomenon of speech. Speaking speech is creative; spoken speech is sedimented. Every actual speech draws on both.

This is the 1945 anticipation of the late "indirect language" doctrine. In Signs (especially "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence" and the 1960 Introduction) MP will generalize the distinction into the broader thesis that all language is indirect — that the speaking subject "operates at the edge of signs" through a diacritical grasp of what meanings are held in reserve as well as what meanings are said aloud.

Why the Distinction Matters

Three consequences follow from making the distinction.

First: language is not a closed system of pre-given significations. Speaking speech generates new significations by articulating them for the first time. The writer, the philosopher, the child learning to speak are all performing acts of speaking speech — taking up the sedimented language they have inherited and using it to say what was never said before.

Second: spoken speech is the condition of possibility of speaking speech. You cannot create meaning from nothing; every new articulation has to take up, transform, and extend the available significations. Speaking speech is parasitic on spoken speech in the way that innovation is parasitic on tradition.

Third: the two modes are continuously reversible. Today's speaking speech becomes tomorrow's spoken speech as it enters the language; today's spoken speech is taken up in a new speaking speech that reactivates its sedimented meanings. The two modes are not two ontological strata but two phases of a continuous process of linguistic self-transformation.

The Linguistic Gesture Doctrine

The speaking/spoken distinction rests on the prior doctrine of the linguistic gesture (Part One Ch VI.g–h). MP argues that there are "neither any natural signs nor any purely conventional signs." Natural signs would be things whose meaning is given by their physical structure alone; conventional signs would be things whose meaning is arbitrary stipulation. Neither exists in pure form. The Japanese smiles when angry where the Westerner turns red — so anger's "sign" is not natural. But the relation between the word "angry" and anger is not arbitrary either — "words, vowels, and phonemes are so many ways of singing the world" (p. 228), each language a distinctive way the human body takes up the emotional essence of things.

Speaking speech is the active version of this doctrine: the speaker's body sings the world into a new configuration. Spoken speech is the passive version: the body takes up a configuration that previous singers have already sedimented into the language.

The 1945–1960 Trajectory

The distinction between speaking and spoken speech undergoes substantial development across MP's corpus. In 1945 it is a late section of Part One Ch VI, doing a specific job in the speech chapter. The Prose of the World (drafted 1950–1952) is the earliest extended treatment of the parlante/parlée distinction, predating both the 1953 Collège de France course and Signs. PW ch.2 develops the distinction programmatically: the reader's encounter with a book becomes the exemplary case, captured in the reading-as-fire metaphor — "I start to read a book idly... suddenly, a few words move me, the fire catches, my thoughts are ablaze" (PW ch.2, pp.10-14). This passage dramatizes the moment sedimented language (parlée) tips into creative speech (parlante). By Signs (1960), the distinction is absorbed into the broader doctrine of indirect language, the coherent-deformation, the "voices of silence." The 1945 version is the seed.

MP's working note from the late 1950s (quoted in V&I) summarizes: "Speech is both a parole parlée and a parole parlante; what I say is both taken up in what has already been said and at the same time opens a dimension that had not yet been there."

The 1953–54 Missing Middle Term: PbP

*Le problème de la parole* (Thursday Collège de France 1953-54) is the missing middle term between the 1945 PoP version and the 1960 Signs version of the distinction (live claim, see claims#pbp-as-middle-term-parole-parlante-parlee-1953-54). The trajectory PoP 1945 → Prose of the World (drafted 1950-52) → Signs (1960) skips a crucial stage. PbP is the missing middle term: it is the course in which MP rewires the parlante / parlée distinction through Saussurean diacritical theory and through the empirical material of aphasia and child language.

In PoP 1945, parole parlante and parole parlée are understood through the linguistic gesture doctrine — speech as a species of bodily gesture, "ways of singing the world." In Signs 1960, the distinction operates through the diacritical theory of meaning and the coherent deformation of expression. The transformation between these two stages happens in PbP. There MP:

  • Re-anchors the distinction in Saussure's diacritical theory: at PbP [26v(36)] he writes in the margin "le signe (et la signification) = écart" — making parole the écart-generating activity.
  • Applies the distinction to aphasia (PbP 80–[90]): aphasia is the loss of parole parlante — the inability to articulate world — even when parole parlée (automatic verbal behavior) is preserved. This is Goldstein's savoir verbal extérieur vs. expression vraie.
  • Applies the distinction to child language acquisition (PbP [56]–[78v(2)]): the child does not learn names for things; the child reorganizes its prelinguistic field so that sounds become sons signifiants (Jakobson). The acquisition is a sustained passage from no-parole to parole parlante.
  • Applies the distinction to literary practice (Proust section, PbP [93]–[127]): the writer's parole littéraire is the paradigm of parole parlante; ordinary parole empirique (Bergotte's "ingénieur pressé" conversation, PbP 100) shows what parole parlée looks like.
  • Closes with MP's own mature phrase for the distinction: at PbP [135v(10)] he writes "Telle est la parole créatrice, originaire" — the "creative, originary speech" — as the operative concept that parole parlante has become.

The most concentrated statement of the transformation is at PbP 135:

"la signification (l'«idée» au sens de Proust) est toujours écart entre 2 ou plusieurs significations, apparition d'un vide déterminé, non possession intellectuelle d'un contenu, que par suite son rapport à ce qui est dit n'est jamais direct, toujours oblique"

This passage is the bridge: the 1945 gestural doctrine has become a 1960 diacritical-indirect-language doctrine, and the bridge is the 1953-54 generalization across language, aphasia, child acquisition, painting, music, and writing. PbP closes by handing the institution / Stiftung problem to the 1954-55 course and the semantic-vs-diacritical problem to the 1960 Origin of Geometry commentary — both of which extend the parole parlante doctrine into the late ontology.

The 1953 Recherches sur l'usage littéraire du langage (ILUL) — the Monday companion course to PbP — develops the literary register of the same transformation, focusing on Valéry, Stendhal, and Proust as practitioners of the parole créatrice.

Andén's foreword to PbP (Andén 2020, p. 9) frames this transition within MP's three-phase career: "phénoménologie de la perception d'abord, la réflexion merleau-pontyenne devient au début des années cinquante une philosophie de l'expression, pour s'accomplir enfin dans les recherches ultimes en une ontologie. Ces trois orientations se retrouvent nouées dans Le problème de la parole." Andén positions PbP as the knot tying together MP's three phases — phenomenology of perception, philosophy of expression, ontology. The parole parlante / parlée doctrine is the thread of that knot: it is the doctrine through which the philosophy of expression hooks back to phenomenology of perception (via aphasia, child language, gesture) and forward into ontology (via écart, niveau, pli — see ecart). See lovisa-anden for Andén's substantive interpretive theses.

Langage-masque: the mask-pole of the double function (PbP 1953–54)

In Le Problème de la parole MP names the parole parlée / sediment pole masque and makes it one term of speech's "double fonction du langage" — stating the mask-function universally: "la parole est plutôt masque qu'expression" (PbP [75–76]), "aucune [parole] ne l'est tout à fait" (PbP [78v(2)]). So the parlante / parlée difference is not a mask/face binary but a gradient indexed to the lived: "Constitution d'une personne en général, d'un masque, ± près du vécu" (PbP [78(2)]). The course's "double fonction" table pairs savoir verbal extérieur | masque, pseudo-personnalité against conquête et appropriation de nouvelles significations | acte humain ("il ne peut être conquête qu'en étant aussi sédimentation"), and MP folds "langage – masque: l'esprit" and "un masque de la désintégration: le savoir verbal extérieur (Goldstein)" into his own course-summary folios ([145], [148]). The criterion separating the poles is the operation (origination vs recombination), but it is necessary-but-not-sufficient: full speech owes its reach not to décentration alone (which yields only "personne apparente") but to its traction on a pre-objective lived world — "notre rapport préobjectif avec le monde" (PbP [76(21)]). See motifs §"masque / langage-masque / pseudo-personnalité / savoir verbal extérieur" and the candidate claims#parole-masque-vecu-traction-not-substrate for the cross-tradition (Chouraqui / AI) cousin reading and its false-friend caution — MP's masque is subject-indexed (it resembles a token-generator's product only from outside, and is not instanced by it).

Fire as the Parlé → Parlant Transition

The Prose of the World uses fire as MP's figure for the moment sedimented language (parlée) tips into creative speech (parlante). The anchors are tight and recurrent:

  • Ch. 2 p. 11: "I start to read a book idly... suddenly, a few words move me, the fire catches, my thoughts are ablaze" — reading is ignition, not decoding.
  • Ch. 2 p. 11: "a match near paper — my gesture receives inspired help from the things around" — expression as the spark by which an inert inheritance becomes active signification.
  • Chs. 2, 3, 5 (recurring): truth as a "spark" in dialogue — conversation as the occasion on which the diacritical system catches fire.

The PW extraction note's motif-weight scan logs this at STRUCTURAL weight: "fire is MP's figure for the moment when sedimented language tips into creative speech; the transition from parlé to parlant" (3 locations across 3 chapters). What the speaking/spoken distinction describes (an active phase-transition within the single phenomenon of speech), the fire figure dramatizes — ignition as the sudden non-gradual shift from inherited to creative usage.

The motif connects to a broader cross-source cluster: in MP's corpus, fire operates also elementally (the Heraclitean cosmos as "ever-living fire," via Kaushik 2019) and perceptually (the spark "between sensing and sensible" in *Eye and Mind* §2 — "the essay's hidden schema"). See flesh-as-element §"Motif Cluster: fire / ignition / spark" for the elemental and perceptual registers; the parlé → parlant ignition is the linguistic counterpart to what fire does in the flesh.

What the Concept Does

  • Transforms Saussure's langue / parole from two objects into two modes of one phenomenon. Saussure's langue is a social system; parole is an individual performance — they are different objects. MP's parole parlante / parole parlée are different modes of a single linguistic being-in-the-world. The transformation is the doctrine.
  • Refuses both empiricism and intellectualism about meaning. Meaning is not a property of the word's physical substrate (empiricism) and not associated to the word by pure thought (intellectualism). Meaning inhabits the word as a linguistic gesture; the body "sings the world" through it.
  • Anchors the late doctrine of indirect language in the 1945 phenomenology. The 1960 doctrine of all-language-as-indirect, all-meaning-as-allusive ("at the edge of signs"), and the diacritical structure of expression are continuous with the 1945 distinction. The trajectory PoP 1945 → Prose of the World (1950–52) → PbP (1953–54) → Signs (1960) is one continuous development with the 1953–54 PbP course as the missing middle term (per claims#pbp-as-middle-term-parole-parlante-parlee-1953-54 live).
  • Provides the structural template for other speaking/spoken distinctions in MP's corpus. Tacit cogito vs. spoken cogito; actual vs. merely possible movement (motor-intentionality); nascent vs. acquired; creative vs. sedimented — all replay the same active/passive structure.
  • Articulates the phase-transition between innovation and sediment as the normal operation of language. Speaking speech is parasitic on spoken speech; today's speaking becomes tomorrow's spoken; spoken speech is reactivable in new speaking. Language is constitutively self-transforming through these two modes; neither is a stable terminal state.

What It Rejects

  • The Saussurean separation of object-types. Langue and parole as distinct levels of linguistic analysis is rejected in favor of two modes of a single phenomenon — though MP affirms Saussure's diacritical structure of meaning at the 1953–54 PbP register.
  • Natural-sign theories and pure-conventional-sign theories alike. "There are neither any natural signs nor any purely conventional signs" (PhP p. 228) — words are "ways of singing the world," differential modulations of a body's emotional-expressive openness.
  • The closed system of pre-given significations. Speaking speech generates significations by articulating them for the first time; the closure-doctrine cannot account for the writer, the philosopher, or the child learning to speak.
  • The pure-creation-from-nothing fantasy. Speaking speech is parasitic on spoken speech; innovation presupposes tradition. The romantic-genius account of expression cannot account for the inheritance condition.
  • The intellectualist-conventional account of aphasia. The chapter VI argument is the negative critique that motivates the positive distinction: neither empiricism nor intellectualism can explain why words lose their "living sense" without losing their material support, or why patients sometimes mean a color without having its name.

Stakes

  • For MP's 1945 architecture: the speaking/spoken distinction is the operative phenomenological account of how language works in the body — the doctrinal payoff of the linguistic-gesture chapter. Without it, PhP's phenomenology of language has no positive resource against empiricism/intellectualism.
  • For the late ontology: per the claims#pbp-as-middle-term-parole-parlante-parlee-1953-54 (live), the PbP 1953–54 course is the missing middle term that rewires the gestural distinction through Saussurean diacritical theory plus the empirical material of aphasia and child language; PbP closes by handing the institution / Stiftung problem to the 1954–55 course and the semantic-vs-diacritical problem to the 1960 Origin of Geometry commentary.
  • For the tacit cogito genealogy: the structural parallel (speaking/spoken speech ↔ tacit/spoken cogito) is acknowledged in the Connections section. When MP retracts the tacit cogito in 1959, does the speaking/spoken distinction survive? — yes, reconfigured (Open Questions).
  • For cross-source synthesis (confidence: speculative framing on the Humboldt-resonance claim): MP does not cite Humboldt's ergon / energeia distinction, but the structural parallel is clear. Whether the parallel is deliberate or accidental is open.
  • For the fire-cluster: the parlé → parlant ignition figure in Prose of the World connects the speaking/spoken distinction to the elemental fire-register (flesh-as-element §"Motif Cluster: fire / ignition / spark") and the perceptual spark ("between sensing and sensible" in Eye and Mind); per the wiki's reading, the three registers are one figure.

Problem-Space

How does language generate new meaning without breaking from inherited meaning? The problem-space recurs across (i) Humboldt's ergon / energeia; (ii) Saussure's langue / parole; (iii) MP's parlante / parlée (1945 → PbP 1953–54 → Signs 1960); (iv) the indirect-language doctrine; (v) the coherent-deformation formula; (vi) the diacritical-écart register of late MP; (vii) the contemporary problem of linguistic creativity-and-constraint. Recurrence under distinct vocabularies makes this a candidate problem-space — the productive non-coincidence of innovation with sediment that any account of expressive language must theorize.

Motif Weight & Corpus Recurrence

  • §"diacritical structure / écart-as-diacritic" (HUB, 6 sources after PbP 2026-05-16 addition, 4 HUB; speaking-spoken-speech hosts the §"The 1953–54 Missing Middle Term: PbP" section)
  • §"sedimentation / incorporation / overdetermination" (HUB, 8+ sources; parole parlée as sedimented language is the linguistic register of the cross-corpus sedimentation HUB)
  • §"masque / langage-masque / pseudo-personnalité / savoir verbal extérieur" (STRUCTURAL, provisional — PbP names the sediment-pole of speech's double function; this page hosts the §"Langage-masque: the mask-pole of the double function" section; see motifs and the candidate claims#parole-masque-vecu-traction-not-substrate)
  • §"silence / mute meaning / Σιγή / world of silence" (HUB, 11 sources after Madison 1981 addition; speaking-spoken-speech is named wiki home for the §"silence as constitutive ground" register, plus the §"Fire as parlé→parlant transition" subsection cross-references silence as Heideggerian das rechte Schweigen)
  • §"fire / ignition / spark / flame / foyer" (HUB, 6 sources, 3 HUB-weighted; speaking-spoken-speech is named wiki home for the §"Fire as parlé→parlant transition" subsection)

For the live attestation lists, source-level weights, and genealogy/cross-tradition links per motif, see motifs. Refresh whenever motifs.md weight changes.

Positions

  • MP in 1945 introduces the distinction as a late section of the speech chapter; the argumentative work is done by the linguistic-gesture doctrine that precedes it, and the speaking/spoken distinction is its formalization.
  • MP in 1960 generalizes the distinction into the broader doctrine of indirect language, where all language is allusive, all meaning is "at the edge of signs," and the distinction between active creation and passive sedimentation governs every act of expression.
  • Saussure distinguishes langue and parole as a system and its performance. MP transforms the distinction: speaking and spoken speech are not different objects but different modes of a single phenomenon.
  • MP's late reading of Saussure (in the 1954–55 courses and in Signs) emphasizes the diacritical structure of language — meaning as differential, meaning "at the edge of signs" — and integrates this with the speaking/spoken distinction.
  • Humboldt's distinction between ergon (work) and energeia (activity) is the deep historical antecedent; MP does not cite it but the structural parallel is clear.

Connections

  • is the 1945 ancestor of indirect-language — Signs's late doctrine
  • is the 1945 ancestor of coherent-deformation — the stylistic-creative extension
  • is the linguistic version of motor-intentionality's distinction between actual and merely possible movement — speaking speech is to spoken speech as abstract movement is to concrete movement
  • is developed through the linguistic gesture doctrine (Part One Ch VI.g–h)
  • informs the later concepts of sedimentation and the "acquired"
  • is parallel to tacit cogito vs. spoken cogito — the same structure applied to self-presence
  • transforms Saussure's langue / parole distinction — from two objects to two modes of a single phenomenon
  • critiques both empiricist and intellectualist theories of language
  • is generalized in the 1954–55 courses and in Signs's theory of expression
  • applies to every expressive act: writer, philosopher, painter, child learning to speak
  • has fire as its transition-figure across flesh-as-element — PW uses fire for the parlée → parlante shift ("reading catches like a fire," ch. 2 p. 11); the same motif operates elementally (Kaushik on Heraclitus B217) and perceptually (E&M's "spark lit between sensing and sensible"); the three registers are one figure

Open Questions

  • Is the distinction stable, or does the phase-transition between speaking and spoken speech undo the distinction? Every new speaking speech immediately starts to sediment; every spoken speech can be reactivated into speaking. The distinction is phase-like rather than categorial.
  • How does speaking speech differ from what V&I will call "the voices of silence"? The late phrase is more tragic — silence is where genuine speech fails — while 1945 is more optimistic — every expressive act can succeed as speaking speech. Is this a change of mood or a change of doctrine?
  • Is the distinction presupposed by the doctrine of the tacit cogito? The same active/passive / creative/sedimented structure governs both. When MP retracts the tacit cogito in 1959, does the speaking/spoken distinction survive? (It seems to, though reconfigured.)
  • MP never explicitly connects the speaking/spoken distinction to the Sartrean existence/essence distinction. The parallel is striking: speaking is to spoken as existence is to essence. Was this parallel deliberate?

Sources

  • merleau-ponty-1945-phenomenology-of-perception — Part One Ch VI, especially subsections g–k (p. 226–240). The distinction is explicit on p. 237 ("a speaking speech and a spoken speech"). The surrounding argument — linguistic gesture, no natural or purely conventional signs, language as ways of singing the world — constitutes the doctrinal base.
  • merleau-ponty-1973-prose-of-the-world — earliest extended treatment of the parlante/parlée distinction; the reading-as-fire metaphor; ch.2 pp.10-14
  • merleau-ponty-2020-probleme-de-la-parole — the missing middle term between PoP 1945 and Signs 1960. PbP rewires the gestural distinction of PoP through Saussurean diacritical theory and through the empirical material of aphasia and child language. Cardinal anchor at PbP 135: "la signification (l'«idée» au sens de Proust) est toujours écart entre 2 ou plusieurs significations." PbP's [76(21)] is the double-nature passage: "savoir verbal extérieur et expression vraie (Goldstein), moyen de mimer l'humanité (bestiaire intellectuel de Hegel) et moyen d'être homme" — articulating the parole parlée / parole parlante distinction in Goldstein's vocabulary fused with Hegel's geistige Tierheit. PbP's mature term for the distinction is "parole créatrice, originaire" (PbP [135v(10)]).
  • merleau-ponty-1964-signs — the generalization into the doctrine of indirect language, in "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence" and the 1960 Introduction. The working note on parole parlante/parlée quoted by MP in his later years captures the mature formulation.
  • kee-2025-foreign-languages-phenomenology — connects the parlante / parlée distinction to PbP's terminology of parole / langue / langage and reads PbP as performatively enacting the distinction: "the meanings of terms are not fixed in advance but are always underway towards a further but never final determination" (Kee p. 76). PbP's interplay between sedimented meaning (spoken speech) and novel, creative meaning (speaking speech) is what allows MP to fashion his own technical vocabulary in the lectures themselves. This is a small but pointed observation: the doctrine as a doctrine is enacted by the very act of stating it. See kee-2025-foreign-languages-phenomenology §1.1, fn 3.