Signs

Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty Year: 1960 (French, Gallimard); 1964 (English, Northwestern UP, trans. Richard C. McCleary) Type: book (collection of essays + a new Introduction)

Signs is Merleau-Ponty's last major published work — a collection of eleven philosophical essays (1947–1959) and fourteen short political pieces (1947–1958), preceded by a newly-written Introduction (February/September 1960) that is effectively his philosophical testament. MP died in May 1961, nine months after finishing the Introduction and while drafting *The Visible and the Invisible*. Signs is therefore the public face of the same philosophical phase whose private notebooks appear in V&I, in *The Possibility of Philosophy*, and in *In Praise of Philosophy*.

The book's unifying figure is action at a distance: the governing claim of the Introduction is that philosophy and politics, philosophy and history, philosophy and its "outside" (art, science, non-European cultures, Christianity) all stand in a relation that is neither subordination nor detachment but "intermingling and promiscuity" from "the depths of [their] difference" (p. 15). This structure is the political translation of what V&I will call the chiasm.

Core Arguments

Claim: Marxism has entered a new phase — valid henceforth only as a classic, a "secondary truth," not as the operative science of history. Because: A century of theoretical and practical undertakings cannot be "refuted" or "verified" like a physics hypothesis; "the error here is not simply the converse of truth but rather a truth that failed" (p. 10). Those who left the Communist Party after Budapest did so as Marxists, not against Marxism — by the same method Marxism taught them. Marxism is now "an immense field of sedimented history and thought where one goes to practice and to learn to think." Against: Both orthodox Communists still claiming Marxism as the science of history, AND ex-Marxists who pretend a simple "refutation." (Intro, pp. 9–14)
Claim: Philosophy and politics must be reconceived as action at a distance — "each from the depths of its difference requiring intermingling and promiscuity." Because: The "political mania among philosophers" produced neither good politics nor good philosophy; the Hegelo-Marxist fusion of philosophy and politics is over. Philosophy "neither looms over history nor is its servant" — it is in "strict sense an action at a distance." The right relation is neither Sartrean despair-at-their-divergence nor identity, but a structural encroachment. (Intro, pp. 15–16)
Claim: The "highest point of philosophy is perhaps no more than rediscovering these truisms: thought thinks, speech speaks, the glance glances. But each time between the two identical words there is the whole spread one straddles in order to think, speak, and see" (p. 21). Because: The chiasma of the visible (not Sartre's being/nothingness) is the structure of all thought. Language, history, perception, intersubjectivity, philosophy/non-philosophy — all share the structure of encroachment and action at a distance.
Claim: All language is indirect and allusive; "the idea of a complete expression is nonsensical." Because: Saussure's diacritical principle entails that "language is made of differences without terms," and so expression is never correspondence but "an operation of language upon language which suddenly is thrown out of focus towards its meaning." The absence of a sign can be a sign (e.g., French "que" expressed by a blank in English "the man I love"). Style is "coherent deformation" — the universal index by which the painter, writer, or speaker makes his perception express itself. (Indirect Language, pp. 39–83) Against: Malraux's Spirit-of-Painting individualism; any intellectualist position that posits a pre-linguistic thought.
Claim: The relation of speaking language to spoken language (and to a science of language) is one of mutual enveloping: synchrony envelops diachrony (the past was once a present system) AND diachrony envelops synchrony (the system in act always contains fissures where brute events insert themselves). Language is "incarnate logic" — "an oriented system which nevertheless always elaborates random factors." Because: The significative intention is "a determinate gap to be filled by words — the excess of what I intend to say over what is being said or has already been said" (Phenomenology of Language, p. 89). Expression is never total, yet each successful expression establishes "a surpassing of the signifying by the signified which it is the very virtue of the signifying to make possible." This is how "transcendental subjectivity is intersubjectivity."
Claim: Husserl's late thought is not what Husserl himself thought it was. What reading for the unthought-of element (das Ungedachte) reveals in Husserl is a trajectory toward "a wild-flowering world and mind" — in which the natural attitude is rehabilitated against naturalism, the solus ipse is dissolved (there is "no constituting of a mind for a mind, but of a man for a man"), and the Earth as Urarche becomes "the 'soil' or 'stem' of our thought as it is of our life." Because: The reflective turn discovers that "reflection cannot 'go beyond' this opening to the world, except by making use of the powers it owes to the opening itself" (Philosopher and His Shadow, p. 165). Husserl's late circularities between Nature and persons, between constituting and constituted consciousness, are not failures but the signature of a two-sided Fundierung: "logical objectivity derives from carnal intersubjectivity on the condition that it has been forgotten as carnal intersubjectivity" (Selbstvergessenheit). "What resists phenomenology within us — natural being, the 'barbarous' source Schelling spoke of — cannot remain outside phenomenology and should have its place within it. The philosopher must bear his shadow." Against: Fink's reading of Husserl as absolute consciousness; any orthodox Husserlianism; also the Heideggerian dismissal of Husserl as metaphysician of presence.
Claim: The history of philosophy is neither juxtaposition of temperaments nor Hegelian synthesis. "Philosophy's center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere" — truth is "there from the start, but as a task to be accomplished, and thus not yet there." Hegel, properly read, does not sacrifice the present to the future; Marxist "historical explanations" of philosophy always conceal a philosophy. Because: "Hegel is the Museum. He is if you wish all philosophies, but deprived of their finiteness and power of impact" (p. 81). Each philosophy is an instituting event whose meaning exceeds its circumstances. Even Oriental thought and Christianity are variants of a relationship to Being that Western philosophy has no right to claim it alone possesses — the most it can claim is the historical task of understanding the others.
Claim: Bergson's true insight was not "duration" as theme but absolute knowledge as partial coincidence / inherence — "I know my duration as no one else does because I am caught up in it; because it overflows me, I have an experience of it which could not be more narrowly or closely conceived of" (Bergson in the Making, p. 186). Because: The partial coincidence is the structure of self-difference, and this is what Bergson put "as the basis of philosophy not an I think and its immanent thoughts but a Being-self whose self-cohesion is also a tearing away from self." Bergson failed only in not extending this structure to history.
Claim: Machiavelli is the first theorist of politics as structure of recognition — power "is of the order of the tacit," can never be naked coercion, and requires the "deep-seated agreement" of the ruled which it can lose in an instant. Virtù is neither cynicism nor moralism but the capacity to "speak to those mute spectators gathered around [one] and caught up in the dizziness of communal life." Because: "In historical action, goodness is sometimes catastrophic and cruelty less cruel than the easygoing mood." The only serious humanism is the one which "confronts the relationship of man to man and the constitution of a common situation and a common history between men as a problem." The pious disavowal of Machiavelli today is itself "Machiavellian" — a dodge.
Claim: The twentieth century has gone beyond the dichotomies of body/mind, signifying/signified, values/facts, juridical/power-politics. Freud, Proust, Gide, Valéry, Malraux, surrealism, and political experience since 1918 all testify to a single truth: ambiguous perception is the essential structure of incarnate life. Because: No natural order predestines human life; the body is "animate," instinct is already person-to-person relation, language is thickness and halo, and political causes are all ambiguous. "It is possible that each policy is really and simultaneously peaceful and warlike" (Man and Adversity, p. 240).

Key Findings

Stiftung / institution of meaning (Husserl) is the model of historicity proper to expression — "the power to forget origins and to give to the past not a survival, which is the hypocritical form of forgetfulness, but a new life, which is the noble form of memory" (Indirect Language, p. 59).
There are two historicities: the derisory "history of events" and the cumulative "historicity of advent." The Museum and the Library perform the first and kill the second.
The significative intention is a determinate gap (Phenomenology of Language, p. 89).
The solus ipse is a "constructed subject"; "we are truly alone only on the condition that we do not know we are" (Philosopher and His Shadow, p. 174).
"There is no constituting of a mind for a mind, but of a man for a man" (PhS, p. 170).
Late Husserl "awakens a wild-flowering world and mind" — a "brute mind... untamed by any culture" (PhS, p. 181).
Lateral universal names the only accessible universality — acquired through the exchange of lived experience between cultures, never given as a priori structure.
Machiavelli's virtù, Montaigne's "ironic and solemn, faithful and free," Bergson's "partial coincidence," and the "chiasma of the visible" are the same figure in different registers.

Methodology

Signs is not a treatise; it is a collection whose unity is retroactively imposed by the 1960 Introduction. Each essay is a free response to an occasion (a painter's catalogue, a Bergson centenary, a colloquium on phenomenology, a political commentary), and MP's method is to read a problem through its border with its own outside: painting through its limit with speech; phenomenology through its limit with linguistics, anthropology, sociology; Husserl through his limit with Heidegger and Schelling; politics through its limit with philosophical rumination. The "unthought-of element" principle borrowed from Heidegger is applied systematically: each essay searches for what has come toward us out of a work "as never yet thought of."

Concepts Developed

Where Signs does original work:

action-at-a-distance — the Introduction's governing figure, naming both the philosophical-political relation and the structural form of expression generally. Primary page anchor.
indirect-language — the thesis that "all language is indirect or allusive" and that speech is "an operation of language upon language." Primary page anchor.
coherent-deformation — Malraux's term, transformed by MP into the universal form of expression. Primary page anchor.
two-historicities — cumulative (advent) vs. derisory (event); the Museum critique. Primary page anchor.
lateral-universal — the universality accessible only through cross-cultural exchange. Primary page anchor.
intentional-transgression — the perceptual reversal by which the other is given to me. Primary page anchor.
unthought — the meta-principle for reading the tradition. Primary page anchor.
sedimentation — "truth is another name for sedimentation, which is itself the presence of all presents in our own." Primary page anchor.

Concepts Referenced

Where Signs touches without developing:

chiasm — the Introduction's "chiasma of the visible" (p. 21) is an explicit published use of a figure V&I will make central; Signs is now an additional primary source.
institution — the Indirect Language passage on Stiftung (pp. 59–60) is the aesthetic-historical register of the concept the 1954–55 Course developed in personal-biological register.
nonphilosophy — Signs adds the Marxist-Sartrean pole of non-philosophy (the "refuge of uncertainty"); the 1959 and 1960–61 Courses treat it as the organizing concept.
ineinander — present as the "mutual enveloping" of synchrony/diachrony, philosophy/sociology, constituting/constituted.
wild-being / barbarian-principle — "the 'barbarous' source Schelling spoke of" (PhS, p. 178) is MP's most explicit published invocation of Schelling's barbarisches Princip in his own voice.
lebenswelt — reaffirmed but not newly developed.
perceptual-faith — echoed in the Introduction's "Urdoxa" discussion.
interrogation — tacit throughout; explicit in Bergson in the Making.
precession — the Earth as "soil or stem of our thought" (PhS, p. 180), citing Husserl's Umsturz der kopernikanischen Lehre.

Key Passages

"The relationship between philosophy and history is less simple than was believed. It is in a strict sense an action at a distance, each from the depths of its difference requiring intermingling and promiscuity. We have yet to learn the proper uses of this encroachment." (Introduction, p. 15)

"In a sense, the highest point of philosophy is perhaps no more than rediscovering these truisms: thought thinks, speech speaks, the glance glances. But each time between the two identical words there is the whole spread one straddles in order to think, speak, and see. The philosophy which lays bare this chiasma of the visible is the exact opposite of a philosophy of God-like survey." (Introduction, p. 21)

"Men never should despair. Underneath the clamor a silence is growing, an expectation. Why could it not be a hope?" (Introduction, pp. 24, 35)

"Language is made of differences without terms; or more exactly... the terms of language are engendered only by the differences which appear among them." (Indirect Language, p. 39)

"The idea of a complete expression is nonsensical... all language is indirect or allusive — it is, if you wish, silence." (Indirect Language, p. 43)

"Perception already stylizes." (Indirect Language, p. 54)

"Husserl has used the fine word Stiftung — foundation or establishment — to designate... that fecundity of the products of a culture which continue to have value after their appearance and which open a field of investigations in which they perpetually come to life again. It is thus that... the whole past of painting all deliver up a tradition to the painter — that is, Husserl remarks, the power to forget origins and to give to the past not a survival, which is the hypocritical form of forgetfulness, but a new life, which is the noble form of memory." (Indirect Language, pp. 59–60)

"The Museum makes the painters as mysterious for us as octopi or lobsters... The Museum kills the vehemence of painting as the Library, Sartre said, changes writings which were originally a man's gestures into 'messages.'" (Indirect Language, p. 63)

"Hegel is the Museum. He is if you wish all philosophies, but deprived of their finiteness and power of impact, embalmed, transformed, he believes, into themselves, but really transformed into Hegel." (Indirect Language, p. 81)

"The significative intention is only a determinate gap." (Phenomenology of Language, p. 89)

"A surpassing of the signifying by the signified which it is the very virtue of the signifying to make possible." (Phenomenology of Language, p. 90)

"Truth is another name for sedimentation, which is itself the presence of all presents in our own." (Phenomenology of Language, p. 96)

"The greater the work accomplished (and greatness is in no way equivalent to the extent and number of writings) the richer the unthought-of element in that work. That is, the richer is that which, through this work and through it alone, comes toward us as never yet thought of." (Philosopher and His Shadow, p. 160, citing Heidegger)

"Reflection cannot 'go beyond' this opening to the world, except by making use of the powers it owes to the opening itself." (PhS, p. 165)

"There is no constituting of a mind for a mind, but of a man for a man." (PhS, p. 170)

"My two hands 'coexist' or are 'compresent' because they are one single body's hands. The other person appears through an extension of that compresence; he and I are like organs of one single intercorporeal reality." (PhS, p. 168)

"True, transcendental solitude takes place only if the other person is not even conceivable, and this requires that there be no self to claim solitude either. We are truly alone only on the condition that we do not know we are; it is this very ignorance which is our solitude." (PhS, p. 174)

"What resists phenomenology within us — natural being, the 'barbarous' source Schelling spoke of — cannot remain outside phenomenology and should have its place within it. The philosopher must bear his shadow, which is not simply the factual absence of future light." (PhS, p. 178)

"Willy-nilly, against his plans and according to his essential audacity, Husserl awakens a wild-flowering world and mind... a rediscovery of that brute mind which, untamed by any culture, is asked to create culture anew." (PhS, p. 181)

"Philosophy's center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere." (Everywhere and Nowhere, p. 128)

"In 1889 it was a great novelty — and one which had a future — to present as the basis of philosophy not an I think and its immanent thoughts but a Being-self whose self-cohesion is also a tearing away from self." (Bergson in the Making, p. 186)

"He sought and maybe found the secret of being simultaneously ironic and solemn, faithful and free." (Reading Montaigne, p. 210)

"Machiavelli was a republican because he had found a principle of communion. By putting conflict and struggle at the origins of social power, he did not mean to say that agreement was impossible; he meant to underline the condition for a power which does not mystify, that is, participation in a common situation." (A Note on Machiavelli, p. 218)

"The symbolic function must always be ahead of its object." (From Mauss to Lévi-Strauss, p. 122)

What's Not Obvious

The Introduction is not an introduction; it is a post-face. Written after all the essays, in February and September 1960, it is MP's attempt to read his own collected work for its own unthought-of element. The book's philosophical thesis — that philosophy and politics stand in the relation of action at a distance — is not argued for in any of the individual essays, including "A Note on Machiavelli" and "Man and Adversity." It is the retroactive discovery of a structure that was implicit in the essays but required the 1960 moment (post-Budapest, post-Hungary, post-Algeria, post-De Gaulle) to appear as a thesis. This is itself a practical demonstration of the "unthought-of" principle MP borrowed from Heidegger in the 1959 Husserl centenary essay: the Introduction to Signs does to Signs itself what "The Philosopher and His Shadow" does to Husserl.
The "chiasma of the visible" is an explicit published use, not only a working-note phrase. It has been common to treat the chiasm as a concept confined to V&I and its working notes, and to treat Signs as MP's "earlier" or "transitional" work. But the Introduction to Signs — written contemporaneously with the V&I drafts — names the chiasm in MP's own published voice, on p. 21, as the highest point of philosophy. The structural inseparability of Signs and V&I is usually underestimated. See also the epigraphic use of the passage in chiasm.
The "barbarous source" is Schelling. In "The Philosopher and His Shadow," p. 178, MP quotes Schelling's barbarisches Princip in his own voice, not in a working note, and uses it as the name for what phenomenology must include. This explicit-voice use has been comparatively under-cited by the Schelling-MP secondary literature (Gardner, Knight), which tends to anchor the barbarian-principle attribution to V&I's November 1960 working note. Signs gives a published locus.

Critique / Limitations

The Introduction's thesis that "philosophy and politics are action at a distance" is never fully defended — it is asserted, staged, and illustrated through the Nizan-Sartre meditation, but the inference from "expression is indirect" to "the right political posture is neither engagement nor disengagement" is not formally made. A hostile reader can complain that MP's ontology is shaped to underwrite a particular liberal-left posture (non-Communist but not anti-Communist, suspicious of Sartrean commitment but not of political seriousness).
The Introduction's political essays (Part III) are dated — often tightly responsive to 1947–58 French and Soviet events. MP himself, in the Introduction, re-reads them partly through an apology for their now-visible blind spots.
MP's reading of Hegel in "Indirect Language" as a "Museum" and of the dialectic as "the phenomenon of expression" is polemically strong but compressed; it sits in tension with MP's fuller Hegel treatment in In Praise of Philosophy and the 1960–61 course "Philosophy and Nonphilosophy since Hegel" (see merleau-ponty-2022-possibility-of-philosophy, Course 3).
The essays on Bergson, Einstein, and Montaigne are compact "centenary" or "commemorative" pieces. They are brilliant short readings, not full-scale monographs.

Connections

is the public face of *The Visible and the Invisible* — the Introduction was written contemporaneously with the V&I drafts and the "chiasma of the visible" passage shows the same concept at work in public voice.
extends *In Praise of Philosophy*'s theme of philosophy becoming a problem for itself — Signs adds the political register.
parallels *The Possibility of Philosophy* — Course 3 ("Philosophy and Nonphilosophy since Hegel," 1960–61) restates the history-of-philosophy thesis of "Everywhere and Nowhere" more technically.
engages directly with chouraqui-2014-ambiguity-and-absolute — the self-falsification thesis has its grain in MP's description (Man and Adversity) of twentieth-century experience as moving beyond clean dichotomies.
is the source of the Husserl-reading strategy later developed in chouraqui-2016-order-of-the-earth — Chouraqui's reading of the Earth as principle of precession depends on MP's own late reading of Husserl's Umsturz in "The Philosopher and His Shadow" (p. 180).
is the proximate occasion of sartre-1984-merleau-ponty-vivant — Sartre's 1961 eulogy uses MP's Signs Preface (pp. 34–35, the "two ways of being young" passage) as its structural heuristic. JBSP footnote 12 records that the Aden Arabie preface (Sartre's 1960 occasion for MP's Signs Introduction) and "Merleau-Ponty Vivant" appear consecutively in Situations IV (pp. 130–188 then pp. 189–287), framing the Sartre/MP dialogue chronologically: Sartre reads Nizan and recants his youth (1960) → MP reads Sartre's recantation (1960 Signs Introduction) → Sartre reads MP after MP's death (1961 manuscript / 1961 LTM / 1964 Situations IV).

Sources

Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960).
Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964). Translator's Preface (pp. ix–xxxii) is a substantial philosophical introduction in its own right. Page references throughout the wiki cite the McCleary translation.