Investigations into the Literary Use of Language

Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty; translated with introduction and notes by Bryan Smyth Year: 1953 (course delivered, January 19 – April 22); 2013 (French publication, ed. Zaccarello & Saint Aubert, Métis Presses); 2026 (English translation) Type: Lecture-course preparatory notes (manuscript; BNF NAF 26994, Vol. XI of Fonds "don 92-21 de Suzanne Merleau-Ponty")

Merleau-Ponty's inaugural Monday course at the Collège de France (1952–53), running concurrently with the Thursday course The Sensible World and the World of Expression (also Smyth-translated). Where the Thursday course corrects *Phenomenology of Perception*'s account of perception by disclosing its inherent expressivity, the Monday course addresses the communicative side: how can transcendental phenomenological insights be communicated to others at all, given that the phenomenologist must use mundane language for non-mundane meanings? MP's answer is a theory of *conquering language* (*langage conquérant*) — speech that sets up a new signification in a "language machine constructed with old signs," paradigmatically the literary writer at work. The course reads Valéry (lectures 3–8) as the writer who articulated the sharpest pessimism about literary expression and partly overcame it through the late practice of the implex, and Stendhal (lectures 9–15) as the writer who already enacted in praxis what Valéry could only approach in theory. Sits as a middle term in the 1953–55 transition zone between *The Prose of the World* (drafted 1950–52, set aside) and *Adventures of the Dialectic* (1955) / *The Visible and the Invisible* (1959–61) / *Eye and Mind* (1961).

Core Arguments

Claim: The theory of language goes wrong by taking constituted speech as its object; it loses sight of language's heuristic / conquering function — the operation by which speech sets up a new signification within a "language machine [machine de langage] / apparatus [un appareil]" built from old signs, an apparatus that "sometimes gives more and sometimes less than what one puts into it." The writer at work is the paradigm. Because: The new sense can only be indicated, not stated; standard theory describes the residue (constituted language) rather than the operation. Conquering language is "language of genuine communication, that also teaches the other, – language in which the one speaking truly is [and] with which he is identical." Against: Logicians; Piaget (Le Langage et la pensée chez l'enfant); classical theories that take language as "expression of statements already matured in the speaker." Location: Course Summary [9]; L2 29–30.
Claim: The modern self-questioning of literature is structured by a four-fold paradox (truth/imaginary; intention/fulfilment; speech/silence; subjective/objective) plus a fifth (author/man, writing/living). These paradoxes are not local literary difficulties but the inheritable form of the philosophical problem of language; the writer's "what is literature?" is structurally the philosopher's "what is meaning?" Because: The writer's anxiety is the same anxiety the philosopher of language faces about meaning-making. MP groups the paradoxes systematically and treats them as the form in which literary modernity poses itself; the philosophy of language inherits this form, not as topic but as method. Against: Treating "what is literature?" as a Sartrean-existentialist question only; MP inherits Sartre's question and reroutes it through a theory of language. Location: Course Summary 10; L1 15–22.
Claim: The revolution from "classical" to "modern" literature is the same revolution as in painting: modern painting replaces "representation" with a looking surrounded (investi) by the visible; modern literature replaces "expression of a separable prosaic signification" with the advent of an inseparable sense. "Absolute literature" is "not founded on rationality but [rather] making it" and is therefore necessarily "in the grip of paradoxes." Because: Painting and language are structurally analogous: both renounce a finished/dominated perspective in favor of an inhabited one. Leiris's "approximate truths forged from one's own experience that others will accept as their own" exemplifies the literary form. Against: La Bruyère's "Of all the different expressions [. . .] there is only one that is right"; classical rhetoric; impersonal universality; rationality-as-completed-truth. Location: L1 17–18.
Claim: Literary expression is in principle indirect. The writer is "the one who makes [others] create" (Valéry). What it produces is not a fact named but a lateral universality — universality not by subsumption under a concept, but by synthesis-in-succession ("a painter learns to paint as himself by painting like the others" — Malraux). Because: Mallarmé: "language is not the interim substitute for things but that which changes them in their meaning." Stendhal Armance: "sexual impotence is shown inasmuch as it is hidden." The work does not culminate in the stillness of the thing said but in the need to say more. Against: The reader's demand for "an image that would be complete"; literature-as-direct-naming; classical concept-universality. Location: L1 20.
Claim: Valéry must be read non-chronologically: his career begins from the impossibilities of language and only later transforms them into means; his maturation occurred "in spite of himself" through the internal logic of his practice. MP reads Valéry "the way he reads Husserl" — beyond himself; textual warrant at L6 [71] marginal: "reading an author is like the acquisition of a new organ that is capable of taking you beyond what he said, and not [the] simple transmission of ideas." Because: Valéry's silence (1894–1917) is not negation of literature but a demand for rigor that maps a prelinguistic domain (body, mind, self–other) that poetry will later try to express; the late Idée fixe + Mon Faust enact what Valéry's intellectual self could not theorize. Against: Valéry's own anti-developmental, anti-identity stance ("I did not believe in identity enough to believe in evolution"); biographical readings of the silence as personal retreat. Location: L3 [31]–[33]; L6 [71].
Claim: Literature is structured by three constitutive deceptions (impostures): (1) the writer is mastered by what his language wants; (2) others appear full where they are merely complementary to our gaps; (3) the work creates an illusory single intentional author through the cunning of its "internal personnel." But these deceptions are what makes conquering language possible: "this, which makes deception possible, also makes conquering language possible" — chance becomes reason (L6 [63]). Because: Language that exceeds us is the same operation as language that conquers — the asymmetric machine that gives more or less than what's put in works the same way in both. Hence the dialectical move: don't deny imposture, work through it. Against: Unified-intentional-author models; Romantic genius theory; readerly fullness-of-comprehension; a consistent Valérian pessimism that takes imposture as the final word. Location: L4 [50]–[52]; L5 [55]–[56]; L6 [63].
Claim: Poetry is not non-signification but overdetermination: language that turns back toward prelinguistic expression rather than fleeing into the universal — and so expresses the singular through particularity, "the lowest note of one's being." The "mystical union" of sound and sense that Valéry calls a "miracle" is founded in reason, not miraculous: signs are diacritical (Saussure), the bond is between differences in significations and differences in signs, not concept-and-sound. Because: "Cf. Saussure saying that signs are 'negative,' 'diacritical,' and conventional [. . .] in operating on each other they constitute a structure that is homologous to that of the signified" (L6 [65]). So Valéry's strict prose-vs-poetry distinction collapses into a distinction between ready-made and active conquering language: "Expressivity dozes off in constituted language." Against: Valéry's own "miracle" diagnosis; Sartre's poetry-as-language-in-reverse / words-as-things in What is Literature?; Mallarméan poetry-as-music. Location: L5 [59]–[62]; L6 [64]–[67].
Claim: Expressivity is "the capacity that [a] certain fold [pli] of language has to indicate, i.e., to communicate, [a] certain depth [relief] of the universe of thought" (L6 [67] marginal). It operates via the implex — Valéry's name for what in us responds to solicitations: not another agent, not Aristotelian potency, but "the imminent" (between actual and potential), "the inflamed idea [l'« idée envenimée »]", "the horizon," "[the capacity] 'to understand'." Memory is "a famous implex"; language is "the animal of words." Because: The implex grounds the why-chance-becomes-reason at L6 [63]; the "extraordinary time" of expression (temps extraordinaire, Idée fixe 137) is the state during which the implex is fully operative. The Humboldtian innere Sprachform (via Goldstein) names the same depth-layer. Against: Both unconscious-as-other-mind psychoanalytic theories and Aristotelian dunamis/energeia; pure-will accounts of writing; pure-spontaneity / inspiration models. Location: L6 [67]–[71].
Claim: Writing is neither end nor means, neither cause nor effect of life — it is opposed to life "by going beyond these mundane categories" — "an effect that's [a] cause and [. . .] a means that's [an] end." This is what allows Bildung through writing: the work has internal logic that outstrips the initial vital choice. Defended via Constant, Proust (Albertine-masquerade through writing-aware-of-lying), Genet (renewal of existential choice in the work). Because: Each of the four negations is structurally distinct (means/end concern writing's production; cause/effect concern writing's relation to life). "We write with what we live, but we make ourselves through what we write, we build ourselves, Bildung" (L8 [87]). The struck-out closing of L8: "Literature is not the opposite of life, but precisely because it is already a way of living, it is in conflict with life as such." Against: Sartre's Baudelaire (existential-reduction of work to vital choice); propaganda-theory; pure-aestheticism; psychoanalytic causal reduction. Location: L8 [85]–[90].
Claim: Engaged literature (in MP's sense) is "not [a] deliberate application to certain problems – but literature as [a] movement that occurs in the very interior of what we live." Sartre's solution — literature as consciousness of a society in permanent revolution — "might dissolve verbally if such a society emerged, but we haven't yet seen a society in permanent revolution." Engagement through disengagement is the operative formula (L6 [80] marginal); the writer is engaged precisely as writer, through the work, not external to it. Because: Even "engaged literature, as literature, always involves the refusal of trickery" (L8 [85]). Valéry's late Mon Faust "I am alive" line is the marker: the writer's acceptance of the implex is engagement. Against: Sartre's engagement continué as moral-political stance taken outside the work; pure-aestheticist withdrawal of literature from politics. Location: L6 [80]–[81]; L7 [83]–[84]; L8 [85].
Claim: Stendhal is an enigma not because of biographical anomaly but because the figure he displays — polite-and-obscene, candid-and-cynical, naive-and-mystifying — is "man himself" lived through one principle, not an alternation of masks. The Bergler psychoanalytic schema (unconscious homosexuality, repression, narcissism, voyeurism) is partially legitimate only where there is failure: outside failure, psychoanalysis is dogmatism — it presupposes a fictitious "normal man" with no questions, no aggression, "no eyes (since voyeurism is already present in the fact of having eyes)." A late working note ([142]v) endorses Lacan as the figure of "psychoanalysis as dialectic developing the truth" against Bergler-style explanation. Because: Sublimation is not a "by-product"; "the success cannot be entirely explained"; "there would be an efficacy of the superstructures." Against: Both biographism (Sainte-Beuve catalog of anecdotes) and psychoanalytic dogmatism (Bergler); the implicit normative ideal of the analyst's "normal man." Location: L9 [95]–[98]; L10 [99]–[101]; L13 [142]v.
Claim: Beyle's vital difficulty in the Mélanie/Louason affair (1804–05) was the impossibility of feeling and perceiving simultaneously: either rapture-paralysis ("I have always felt more than I have perceived") or distance-and-role (cynical Valmont-Machiavellianism / Rousseauist sentimentalism). The "create the role" attempted solution fails: pure self-improvisation is felt by the other as "[a] freedom that improvises [. . .] devouring possibilities and not 'taking,' [a] 'mortal' and 'crazy' freedom." Stendhal's predicament is worse than Valéry's pride/vanity diagnosis: not the failure to coincide with oneself but "the failure of non-truth through excess, through self-creation." Because: For Valéry the other is a "fraternal enemy that he needs"; for Stendhal the other is invasive and constitutive: "what he knows most dearly." So the impasse is properly relational. Against: Sartre's "consciousness wants to draw on nothing but itself"; the Valmont solution; the Saint-Preux solution. Location: L10 [103]–[106]; L11 [108]–[115].
Claim: The truth is in essence poetic, found only in fiction — which is not unreal or arbitrary. Truth is poetry for two reasons: (a) reality is detail-equivocal — only fiction generated from *petits faits vrais* can deliver truth; (b) "true reasons would slow down the movement of the subject" — beyond a certain point lucidity becomes error ("Ah! a thousand times rather, let's be fooled"). And the reciprocity: "Truth is poetry but [this is] because poetry is truth." Because: Mme de Tracy on Stendhal (1834 note on Le Rouge): "we can no longer reach the truth except in the novel." The technical means is indirect or objective lyricism (Fernandez's term): "arouses emotion which involves showing facts, things, without saying their effect." Internal monologue and silence work as paired techniques: monologue affirms separation-and-relation with the other; silence intervenes "where unforeseen actions are worked out" (Julien reaches for the sword). Against: Both naive realism (the Journal gives the truth) and Taine-style statistical objectivism; both freeze the instant. Location: L11 [118]; L14 [126]–[131].
Claim: Stendhal's *involuntary literature* is the positive demonstration of what Valéry only theorized: the Journal's internal monologue is what Stendhal "stumbled into" by giving up the explicit literary project (poetry, theater) and recording his own progress. "What he writes there is different from what he thought he was writing." Not Romantic spontaneism but exercised spontaneity reached precisely by relinquishing the demand to either construct or coincide with a given self. Maturity = "consenting to oneself." Because: Stendhal "manages to be spontaneous" not in living but in writing — the passage from living to writing happens "spontaneously and almost unknowingly." "Style of non-style. [But] style nonetheless." Reverie is what Stendhal "preferred to anything else" (Souvenirs d'Égotisme). Against: Valéry-style pride/vanity dichotomy without a third spontaneous-but-disciplined possibility; Flaubert's "religion of literature"; Mérimée's failure to "catch a dream in the nascent state." Location: L10 [102]; L12/13 [122]–[124]; L13 [137]–[138]; L14 [127].
Claim: The writer's politics is the politics of the writer-as-writer. Not a positive program but the passion of the relation of man to man. "To be human is also to take a side" (Stendhal's Lucien Leuwen marginalia, MP's marginal at L14 [130], formalized at L15 [132]). The writer takes a side as writer — through the work, not external to it. The closing line of the entire notes: "Unaffiliated [with a party] because he is engaged not in the sense of being this or that, but in the sense of knowing what he's doing" (L15 [145]v). Because: Stendhal's apparent political instability conceals "a line he follows" — "his absolute refusal to accept ignorance and misery"; these negations are "just as committed as a party membership." The universal-future criterion: "the party man will be very cold in fifty years' time, all that matters is what will remain interesting when the case has been tried." Misery is "death without a mask, pure absurdity." Great politics (Danton, Mirabeau, Richelieu) requires the "scoundrel" who has the courage to act. Against: Apolitical aestheticism ("politics in a novel is a pistol shot in the middle of a concert"); liberal constitutionalism (propter vitam vivendi perdere causas); Sartrean engagement as taking-of-position; Lukács's class-determinism (the writer's equivocation is not bourgeois class-position but "the very equivocation of the writer who can't not preserve what he wants at the same time as going beyond"). Location: L15 [132]–[135]v; working note [145]–[145]v.
Claim (Sartre/Parain Reading Notes Appendix): What is needed in place of Sartre's antithetic position on language is "a dialectic of the I and others" — a theory of intersubjectivity in which the perspective of the I and its syntheses is truly overcome, "not in the direction of an Absolute that would reduce us all to objects, but in the direction of a dialectic of the I and others." Sartre's step "does not modify the first step, but simply cancels it"; what is needed is pre-linguistic consciousness as "presence to ambiguity, not positing or Vorstellung but inhabitation [fréquentation] of the world"; subject as "generativity, [impersonal] bodily one"; language-integration required by my "own existence as a productive existence that wants to recover itself"; recognition that "this recovery is itself never completed." MP coins "a-focalism" for the resulting consciousness-as-ubiquité: "consciousness [. . .] is never in this word, in language, and it is never anywhere but in what it does." Because: "to be conscious of speaking is first of all to speak." Words have autochthonous significance prior to thematization; "what conceals this is the privilege granted, in language, to indicative statements." The closing question of the Appendix points forward to V&I: "how is there a traditionality, a reactivation which is easier than Stiftung [institution]?" Against: Parain (language-as-thing); Sartre (language as already-synthesized complex re-constituted by individual consciousness, with the other as "active negation"); Husserlian retention of Vorstellung as privileged form. Location: Appendix [162]–[168]v.
Claim (the cross-section): Stendhal's "naturalness" IS the problem of others resolved practically — what Sartre cannot solve in theory, Stendhal already enacts in praxis. MP's parenthetical inside Sartre's text at Appendix [165]: "(The 'naturalness' of Stendhal is the problem of others resolved practically [. . .] it's the advent of a transparency in the relation with others, [a] transparency that is neither given nor reflexive, but the very transcendence of a praxis that transforms its given conditions)." Because: The Stendhal block and the Appendix are two sides of one argument. Stendhal's literary involuntary-and-disciplined improvisation is the practical instance of what the Appendix calls "praxis that transforms its given conditions." Against: Sartre's ontologization of being-for-others as alienation; the incidental implication that MP's Stendhal is, in praxis, what Sartre's metaphysics of language fails to deliver. Location: Appendix [165], parenthetical.

Argumentative Movement

The course's lecture-form is fragmentary and non-linear, but the deep movement is dialectical:

Setup (L1–L2): The classical/modern revolution names a four-paradox structure; the writer's "what is literature?" is the philosopher's "what is meaning?" Goal: conquering language as wedge for a general theory of language and symbolism.
Negative moment — Valéry (L3–L5): The impossibility of literature. Silence as demand for rigor maps the prelinguistic; three impostures show literature is deception. Cynical-Valérian conclusion: the author is a fiction; sincerity is impossible.
Pivot (L6 §1–§2): "This, which makes deception possible, also makes conquering language possible." Saussurean correction of the mystical-union miracle. Chance becomes reason.
Positive moment — Valéry, late (L6 §3–§4 + L7–L8): Expressivity as fold-of-language indicating depth-of-thought; implex as what responds to solicitations; "extraordinary time" of expression; Mon Faust's acceptance of life; engagement through disengagement; writing as neither end nor means.
Second negative moment — Stendhal vs Bergler (L9–L11): Psychoanalytic interpretation pushed to its limit and beyond — legitimate only at failure; Stendhal's vital difficulty in the Mélanie affair; "create the role" fails.
Positive demonstration — Stendhal (L12/13–L14): Involuntary literature; truth is poetry; indirect lyricism; internal monologue and silence paired; maturity as consenting to oneself.
Closure (L15): Writing and living; Stendhal's politics; the writer's engagement-without-affiliation.
Appendix — Sartre/Parain Reading Notes: The most explicit 1953 anti-Sartre formulation. Dialectic of the I and others; a-focalism; pre-objective language. The closing Stiftung-question points to V&I.

The dialectical structure is non-coincidental: the Stendhal block is deliberately placed after the Valéry block (reverse chronological order in literary history) because Stendhal practically resolves what Valéry only theoretically diagnoses. Smyth: "if these notes were to form the basis for a novel, then it is Stendhal who would be the hero."

Key Findings

The 1953 chiasm-vocabulary attestation in MP — sourced from Valéry's Tel Quel I 42 "metathesis or chiasma of two 'lifelines'," appears at three locations in this source (Course Summary [11], L3 [43], L5 [54]). This is a social-relational chiasm predating by ~6 years the late ontological-reversibility chiasm of V&I. Smyth's Translator's Note 9 verifies chiasma de deux destinées against Gilbert's "intercrossing." Adds a 1953 datum to the wiki's chiasm genealogy alongside the empiètement (1953 Cours sur Husserl) → hinge (1954–55) → chiasm (1959) lineage, in the social-intersubjective rather than perceptual register.
Saussurean correction of Valéry's "mystical union" (L6 [64]–[66]) — connects this source to the wiki's diacritical structure / écart-as-diacritic HUB cluster (Thursday course, V&I working notes, Kaushik 2021 on implex). The Saussurean reading is what dissolves Valéry's miracle into a system-of-differences-to-system-of-differences mapping.
Direct 1953 implex passage — L6 [69]–[71] supplies the MP-textual material the wiki's implex page currently sources only via Johnson 2020 and Kaushik 2021. Specifically: the "imminent / inflamed idea / horizon" formulation; the magnetic-field analogy; the explicit "[the implex] ≠ another thinker in us"; the connection to crystallization (Stendhal On Love + Breton).
1953 anticipation of the 1955 action-of-unveiling-vs-action-of-governing distinction — L14 [131] ("the will to manifest, to unveil, to reveal the distance as much as it bridges it") + L15 [133] + L15 [145]v ("Unaffiliated because he is engaged not in the sense of being this or that") together constitute the embryonic form of the 1955 distinction. Strong candidate for a Phase-8 genealogical claim: see claims#mp-1953-anticipates-1955-action-of-unveiling-vs-governing (candidate).
MP-Lacan affinity 1953 (L13 [142]v working note) — "Psychoanalysis as conceived by Lacan does not presuppose the perspective of the normal man." One of the earliest published-via-edited-notes MP-Lacan textual contacts.
The Stendhal-Sartre cross-section (Appendix [165]) — MP's parenthetical inside Sartre's text: "Stendhal's 'naturalness' is the problem of others resolved practically." Single most architecturally important sentence in the course; bridges the Stendhal block and the Sartre/Parain Appendix at one stroke. Strong candidate claim: see claims#stendhal-naturalness-practically-resolves-sartre-antithetic (candidate).
"MP reads Valéry the way he reads Husserl" — textual warrant at L6 [71] marginal: "reading an author is like the acquisition of a new organ that is capable of taking you beyond what he said." This is MP's own statement of his Husserl-reading methodology, applied to Valéry — not just Smyth's framing.

Methodology

The lectures are preparatory notes in mostly handwritten manuscript (some typewritten); MP wrote them for short-term oral use, and they consist substantially of quoted passages from Valéry's Cahiers / Tel Quel / Variété / Idée fixe / Mon Faust and Stendhal's Journal / Henri Brulard / Le Rouge et le Noir / Lucien Leuwen / Souvenirs d'Égotisme / De l'amour. The notes for some lectures are much more extensive than for others; in some places the editors had to parse the notes out lecture-wise. The originally anticipated 14 lectures were extended to 15 (an extra Wednesday session at the end).

The course is not a literary-critical close reading even though its figures are literary. MP's stated method (L2 [29]–[30]): "to come to terms with literary language as something fundamentally different from ordinary (non-literary) language" by pursuing "writers' own questions about what they themselves were doing" — and through this, to contribute toward "a theory of language and in general [a theory] of symbolism" with "sociological" implications. The figures are exemplars; the target is methodological. The deep target (per Smyth's Introduction) is Eugen Fink's three paradoxes of transcendental phenomenology (Kant-Studien 1933): the constructive answer is that language can in fact "indicate" depth even though it cannot directly "state" it — via expressivity / conquering language / the implex / the extraordinary time. Fink is not named in the lecture notes themselves; the Fink-as-target reading is Smyth's interpretive frame.

Reading discipline: MP reads both Valéry and Stendhal "the way he reads Husserl" — taking them beyond themselves, distinguishing what they said from what their mature practice instantiates. This is textually warranted at L6 [71] marginal: "reading an author is like the acquisition of a new organ that is capable of taking you beyond what he said, and not [the] simple transmission of ideas."

Concepts Developed

Primary concepts on which this source does original work:

*Conquering language* (*langage conquérant*) — MP's term for speech that makes a new signification; the operative concept of the course. Course Summary [9]; L2 [29]–[30]; L6 [63].
Expressivity (*expressivité*) — formal definition at L6 [67] marginal as "the capacity that [a] certain fold [pli] of language has to indicate [. . .] [a] certain depth [relief] of the universe of thought." Bridge term to the Thursday course's perceptual-expressivity definition.
Implex / animal of words — Valéry-borrowed, MP-developed. L6 [69]–[71] is the densest MP attestation; supplies what the existing wiki page currently sources via Johnson 2020 / Kaushik 2021.
Involuntary literature — MP's name for what Stendhal "stumbled into" in the Journal; exercised spontaneity reached by giving up the explicit literary project. L12/13 [122]; L13 [137]; L14 [127].
Truth is poetry / *le vrai est poésie* — L14 organizing thesis with the reciprocity "Truth is poetry but [this is] because poetry is truth." L11 [118]; L14 [126]–[131].
Imposture (three-fold) — L4–L5 systematic enumeration; L6 [63] turning point: the same operation that makes imposture possible makes conquering language possible.
Writing and living — L8 quadruple-negation (neither end nor means, neither cause nor effect) + L15 "Writing and living" section. The work has internal logic that outstrips initial vital choice; Bildung as writing's mode of becoming.
Engagement through disengagement — L6 [80] marginal; the operative formula for the writer's mode of engagement that is not Sartrean engagement continué.
*Être humain est un parti* / "to be human is also to take a side" — Stendhal-derived; closing thesis of the course; the writer's politics; L15 [145]v supplies the final line "Unaffiliated because he is engaged."
Paradoxes of literary writing (four-fold + author/man) — the structural inventory of L1 + L2 that organizes the modern self-questioning of literature.
Dialectic of the I and others — MP's anti-Sartre formulation in the Sartre/Parain Appendix; four-point program at [167]–[168]v.
Indirect or objective lyricism — Fernandez's term MP endorses (L14 [127]); structurally identical to MP's later "indirect language."

Concepts Referenced

Concepts the source uses but does not develop:

chiasm — Valéry-mediated 1953 attestation in the social-relational register (Course Summary [11]; L3 [43]; L5 [54]).
coherent-deformation — L6 [70] marginal explicit use: "a certain lack, a 'coherent deformation,' a manner that guides us." Connects this source's conquering language to the broader genealogy.
silence — multiple registers (Valéry's biographical 1894–1917 silence as rigor; Stendhal's monologue-and-silence paired technique).
lateral universality — L1 [20] (Malraux); L6 [73] (implicit) — universality through synthesis-in-succession.
hyperobjectivity / *Surobjectivité* — L1 [19]; L2 [30] "universality without a concept."
*petits faits vrais* — Stendhal's term, picked up positively (L14 [126]).
Stiftung — Appendix [167]v closing question: "how is there a traditionality, a reactivation which is easier than Stiftung [institution]?"
antithetic critique of Sartre — extended and sharpened in the Sartre/Parain Appendix into the language-philosophical register.
action of unveiling (1953 anticipation) — L14 [131]; L15 [133].
machine for living / for speaking / for seeing — Valéry's machine à vivre, picked up across L3, L5, L6 (per Translator's Note 51, extends into the Thursday course).
extraordinary time / *temps extraordinaire* — L6 [70]; the state during which the implex is fully operative.
parole parlante / parlée — not explicitly called back, but the conquering-language / constituted-language distinction is structurally the same opposition.
Erlebnis, Sinngebung, Vorstellung, Selbstverständlich, aufgehoben, passive synthesis — Husserlian apparatus deployed in the Sartre/Parain Appendix.
Innere Sprachform (Humboldt via Goldstein) — L6 [69]; depth-layer of acquired language.
Crystallization (Stendhal On Love + Breton) — L6 [70] re what implex does with the "given fragment."

Terminology (key bilingual technical terms)

French (or original)	English translation	Attestation locations	Translation notes
langage conquérant	conquering language	CS [9]; L2 [29]–[30]; L6 [63]	Translator preserves; MP's distinctive term
machine de langage / un appareil	language machine / apparatus	CS [9]	Operational image, not cybernetic metaphor
imposture	imposture (singular/personal) / deception (plural/impersonal)	L4 [50]–[52]; L5 [55]–[56]; L6 [63]	Per Smyth's Note on the Translation: contextual rendering
expressivité	expressivity	L6 [67] heading + marginal	Bridge term to Thursday course
implex	implex (kept untranslated)	L5 [58]v; L6 [69]–[71]	Valéry's neologism, Smyth keeps as-is
animal des mots	animal of words	L6 [71]	Valéry via Pius Servien
temps extraordinaire	extraordinary time	L6 [70]	Valéry, Idée fixe 137
pli / relief	fold / depth	L6 [67] marginal	The two terms of the formal definition of expressivity
monnaie fiduciaire	fiduciary currency	CS [11]; L6 [66]–[67]	Valéry, Variété III 49
petits faits vrais	true little facts	L1 [19]; L14 [126]	Stendhal's signature term
reverie (italicized)	reverie	L9; L11; L12/13; L13; L14	Kept as italicized French; Stendhal-specific sense
pénétré	penetrated	L10 [104]	Stendhal's word for emotional involvement
être humain est un parti	to be human is also to take a side	CS [14]; L14 [130]; L15 [132]; L15 [145]v	Stendhal Lucien Leuwen marginalia
ment / tout pouvoir ment	lies / every government lies	L15 [135]; working note [145]v	Stendhal Lucien Leuwen p. 1102
dialectique du Je et des autres	dialectic of the I and others	Appendix [166]v	MP's anti-Sartre formulation
ubiquité	pluripresence	Appendix [168]v	Tied to MP's "a-focalism" coinage
Stiftung	institution	Appendix [167]v	Husserlian; closing question

Key Passages

"The theory of language is usually based on its so-called exact forms [. . .] it loses sight of the heuristic value of language, its conquering function [sa fonction conquérante], which in contrast is evident in the writer at work. Constituted language should perhaps instead be considered as a secondary form of language, derived from the initial operation that sets up a new signification in a language machine [une machine de langage] constructed with old signs." (Course Summary [9])

"[L]iterature appears to itself as a problem, [. . .] the writer wonders: 'what is literature?'" (Course Summary 10)

"absolute literature which, not being founded on rationality but [rather] making it, appears as difficult and in the grip of paradoxes." (L1 18)

"the creator is 'the one who makes [others] create.'" (L1 20, Valéry via MP)

"a painter learns to paint as himself by painting like the others. [A] lateral universality that is synthetic [. . .] in the succession of painters as in that of writers." (L1 20, Malraux)

"Take conquering language [langage conquérant], – language of genuine communication, that also teaches the other, – language in which the one speaking [le parlant] truly is [and] with which he is identical" (L2 29–30)

"between the other person and myself, an 'exchange' or a 'chiasma of two 'lifelines' [. . .]' is forged in which we are never entirely two, and yet in which we cease to be alone." (Course Summary 11, citing Valéry Tel Quel I 42)

"to be human is also to take a side [être humain est un parti]" (Course Summary 14; reprised at L14 [130]; L15 [132]; L15 [145]v)

"Refusal of living, of being anything at all, in particular refusal of literature [. . .] He proceeds backwards, and, looking toward the initial impossibilities, he overcomes them in his being, even though he doesn't see himself overcoming them." (L3 [31])

"speech is Janus-faced, to oneself and to others, and hence [the] source of all the misunderstandings, illusions, sorcery, [and] ambiguities of the relationship [between] self [and] other." (L3 [45])

"the writer is only [a] 'devastating critic and hunter' (Tel Quel I 194) who seizes hold of 'what we did not want [to write] but which is wanted by what we did want [to write].'" (L4 [50]–[51])

"[L]anguage exceeds us, it's confusing for us and for others, unintentional, in this sense the risk is real, – but this, which makes deception [imposture] possible, also makes conquering language possible." (L6 [63])

"The 'mystical union' is founded in reason because it's not a matter of uniting [a] concept with [a] sonorous phenomenon, but [of uniting] differences in significations and differences in signs, and because speech as [a] system in the process of differentiation can provide a diagram of sense in the process of differentiation." (L6 [66])

"Valéry's definitions of prose and poetry become [respectively] that of ready-made language and actual conquering expressivity. Expressivity dozes off in constituted language." (L6 [66]–[67])

"Expressivity = [the] capacity that [a] certain fold [pli] of language has to indicate, i.e., to communicate, [a] certain depth [relief] of the universe of thought." (L6 [67] marginal)

"[The implex] ≠ another thinker in us who would know what we don't know. [. . .] It's what in us is capable of responding to solicitations [. . .] it's not the actual or the Aristotelian potential, it's the imminent [. . .] it's not the idea and not the thing but the 'inflamed idea' [l'« idée envenimée »], it's the horizon." (L6 [69]–[71])

"reading an author is like the acquisition of a new organ that is capable of taking you beyond what he said, and not [the] simple transmission of ideas." (L6 [71] marginal)

"The voice of poetry is a voice of things, the enunciation of what they want to say inasmuch as they coexist." (L6 [75])

"((poetry = metamorphosis of one thing into another inasmuch as they have the same manner of modulating being))" (L6 [77])

"Engagement through disengagement. (the l'Académie Française episode)" (L6 [80] marginal)

"Language as '[the] body of the mind' goes from being [the] problem to [the] solution." (L6 [81])

"For my part, that's the meaning I give to engaged literature: not [a] deliberate application to certain problems – but literature as [a] movement that occurs in the very interior of what we live." (L6 [81])

"Writing is not [an] end nor [a] means [. . .] Language is not [an] instrument for a meaning given outside of it – The action of the work is oblique, its meaning is open or overdetermined." (L8 [85])

"we write with what we live, but we make ourselves through what we write, we build ourselves, Bildung." (L8 [87])

"an effect that's [a] cause and [. . .] a means that's [an] end." (L8 [89])

"Literature is not the opposite of life, but precisely because it is already a way of living, it is in conflict with life as such." (L8 [90], crossed out)

"Deliberate unseemliness. He is polite and obscene by the same principle – Look for this principle." (L9 [95])

"Psychoanalysis is only and can only be explanatory when the division of the self [. . .] currently attests to the absolute unconscious (failure)." (L10 [100])

"man with no eyes (since voyeurism is already present in the fact of having eyes)." (L10 [100])

"Two subjectivities in a relation of praxis in which a truth that is not already there appears or shows through. Psychoanalysis as conceived by Lacan does not presuppose the perspective of the normal man." (L13 [142]v)

"I have always felt more than I have perceived, which makes me as fresh as a child." (L10 [104], Stendhal Journal II, 45)

"[a] freedom that improvises, that throws itself into the unreal and embodies it, devouring possibilities and not 'taking,' not taking anything for granted, [a] 'mortal' and 'crazy' freedom." (L11 [111])

"the failure of non-truth through excess, through self-creation." (L11 [115])

"we want what is emerging and taking shape in the situation." (L13 [142]v)

"The truth is in essence poetic, [it] is found only in fiction, – which is not unreal or arbitrary." (L11 [118])

"the passage from living to writing occurs spontaneously and almost unknowingly." (L12/13 [122])

"Wanting to provide himself with training [. . .] he comes to record his progress. But what he writes there is different from what he thought he was writing. 'Montaigne said that if he had made his book, the book had, in return, made him.'" (L13 [137])

"true little facts [petits faits vrais] = words or actions that speak for themselves, which are [a] trace or [an] expression." (L14 [126])

"Ah! a thousand times rather, let's be fooled" (L14 [126], Stendhal Le Rouge)

"Stendhal is only excellent at telling stories when a kind of latent philosophy of the 'significance of the facts' [. . .] comes to animate his narration." (L14 [127], Gide preface to Lamiel 1946)

"Truth is poetry but [this is] because poetry is truth." (L14 [131])

"the discovery of language, of a spontaneous language that connects with others and connects with everything, the will to manifest, to unveil, to reveal the distance as much as it bridges it." (L14 [131])

"The whole evolution of Stendhal is to consent to himself." (L13 [138])

"the work of art [. . .] must be political, because to be a man is to be in relations with reality, [with] other men." (L15 [134])

"every government lies" (L15 working note [145]v, Stendhal Lucien Leuwen p. 1102)

"Unaffiliated [with a party] because he is engaged not in the sense of being this or that, but in the sense of knowing what he's doing." (L15 [145]v — final line of notes)

"Sartre only speaks of language insofar as it is not understood, as a principle of disagreement. But [what about] successful communication?" (Appendix [165], MP marginal inside Sartre's text)

"(The 'naturalness' of Stendhal is the problem of others resolved practically, it's the overcoming of these difficulties of S[artre], of being haunted by others, of the sliminess [viscosité] of sensing [. . .] it's the advent of a transparency in the relation with others, [a] transparency that is neither given nor reflexive, but the very transcendence of a praxis that transforms its given conditions.)" (Appendix [165], MP parenthetical)

"in the direction of a dialectic of the I and others." (Appendix [166]v)

"how is there a traditionality, a reactivation which is easier than Stiftung [institution]?" (Appendix [167]v)

"to be conscious of speaking is first of all to speak. Consciousness [. . .] is by definition pluripresence [ubiquité], it is never in this word, in language, and it is never anywhere but in what it does." (Appendix [168]v — MP's a-focalism coinage)

What's Not Obvious

The course is not a literary-critical close reading. Its surface form is a study of Valéry and Stendhal, but MP says at L2 [29]–[30] that the goal is not the professional problem of the writer; it is to use literary language as the wedge for "[a] theory of language and in general [a] theory of symbolism" with "sociological" implications. The natural reception of this course as Valéry-and-Stendhal studies misses MP's actual target — which (per Smyth's Translator's Introduction) is Eugen Fink's three paradoxes of transcendental phenomenology from the 1933 Kant-Studien essay. The expressivity-via-conquering-language-via-implex apparatus is the constructive answer to Fink's "permanent perplexity." Reading the course as literary criticism mistakes the example for the question. (Fink is not named in the lecture notes themselves; only in Smyth's Introduction. So this reading is Smyth's interpretive frame, not MP's textual claim.)
The chiasm-vocabulary of V&I has a 1953 Valéry-mediated origin in this course — and this finding is not currently captured by the chiasm wiki page. At Course Summary 11, L3 [43], and L5 [54], MP cites Valéry's Tel Quel I 42 "metathesis or chiasma of two 'lifelines'" and even uses the chiasm as a heading-level term at L5 [54]. Smyth's Translator's Note 9 verifies chiasma de deux 'destinées' against Stuart Gilbert's earlier "intercrossing." The 1953 Monday-course chiasm is in the social-intersubjective register (each completes the other through reciprocal looking-and-being-looked-at), distinct from the late ontological-reversibility chiasm at the level of flesh in V&I. The wiki's existing chiasm-genealogy (empiètement 1953 → hinge 1954–55 → chiasm 1959) gains a parallel-1953 social-register attestation. This source is the textual home for that attestation; the wiki had to wait for the 2026 English edition to anchor it directly.
The closing line of the entire notes is a political-philosophical thesis, not a literary one. L15 [145]v: "Unaffiliated [with a party] because he is engaged not in the sense of being this or that, but in the sense of knowing what he's doing." MP is reading Stendhal, but he is also defending his own contemporaneous position re: Les Temps Modernes (the editorial silence on Korea since 1950) against Sartre's accusation of disengagement. The course was delivered in spring 1953; the famous Sartre/MP rupture letters are from July 1953. The closing political turn of the Stendhal block is MP working out, in praxis, the philosopher's response to Sartre's engagement continué. Connects to the existing antithetic critique of Sartre (anchored to 1945 S&NS) and to action of unveiling vs action of governing (1955 AdV), neither of which currently shows this 1953 bridging anchor.

Critique / Limitations

The Saussurean correction at L6 [64]–[66] is asserted, not shown. MP claims the "mystical union" of sound and sense "is founded in reason" once we read signs as diacritical: "speech as [a] system in the process of differentiation can provide a diagram of sense in the process of differentiation." But the homology between two systems-of-differences is asserted, not argued — why should differences-in-sound diagrammatically correspond to differences-in-meaning? The whole Saussurean-as-key-to-Valéry move rests on this asserted homology.
Conquering language presupposed, not defended. The course presupposes that language has a heuristic / conquering function in the first place. MP's argument is descriptive (Valéry, Stendhal, Mallarmé, Malraux all do it) and dialectical (the impostures are what make conquering possible), but nowhere defended against a Wittgensteinian view that language only ever deploys conventions and that "conquest" is a retrospective illusion of slow public-language-game extension.
The Fink-as-target reading is Smyth's, not MP's. Fink is not named in the lecture notes themselves (verified across the full notes). The connection is Smyth's interpretive frame in the Translator's Introduction; defensible (the structural parallels are strong) but not textually warranted from MP's side. Should be flagged when used.
Manuscript-order anomaly in the Stendhal block. L12/13 ([120]–[124]) and L13 ([136]–[139]) are two drafts of the same lecture; L14 ([125]–[131]) is a separate lecture whose BNF pagination is a MP pagination error. The French editors' reconstruction is clean, but a hasty reader may treat the two drafts as two lectures.
Several MP-internal pages are struck-out. L7 [83]v–[84] and L8 [89]–[90] (which contain the most explicit anti-Sartre material on permanent-revolution / literature-in-conflict-with-life) are crossed out by MP with large X marks. The closing thesis "Literature is not the opposite of life [. . .] in conflict with life as such" sits in struck-out material — interpretive caution warranted.
Course delivered orally — notes are skeletal. Especially in the Stendhal block, "relatively more of the content of these lectures was conveyed in [MP's] extemporal oral elaboration of his (relatively schematic) notes" (Translator's Introduction). The wiki's reconstruction necessarily reads more from the notes than was on the page.
Underdeveloped sociological extension. MP says the course will have "sociological implications" via a theory of symbolism (L2 [29]); in fact the sociological extension is gestured at L15 (the Lukács engagement) but never developed. Smyth: "He probably did not get to this in any significant way in the course, or at any rate no such implications are discussed in his notes."
Proust effectively absent. Course Summary mentions Proust; L1 invokes him; but the planned detailed treatment is deferred to the 1953–54 Thursday course "Le problème de la parole" (per Translator's Note 12). For Proust-via-MP, see Institution and Passivity + Carbone 2004 / Carbone 2015.

Connections

companion to merleau-ponty-2020-sensible-world-expression — the two 1953 courses are concurrent and complementary: Thursday addresses expressivity at the perceptual register; Monday addresses expressivity at the linguistic/communicative register. Translator's Note 51 cross-references the "machine for living" / "machine for speaking" between the two
extends merleau-ponty-1973-prose-of-the-world — the PoW manuscript (drafted 1950–52) is set aside in this course's framing, but the conquering-language thesis is the operative concept PoW developed; PoW's "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence" chapter (published June–July 1952 in Les Temps Modernes, then in *Signs* 1960) is contemporaneous with this course and supplies its public face
prepares merleau-ponty-1955-adventures-of-the-dialectic — the writer's-engagement-without-affiliation closing of L15 supplies the political-philosophical bridge between MP's 1947–48 Humanism and Terror / Sense and Non-Sense positions and the 1955 break with Sartre. The Sartre/Parain Appendix anticipates the AdV "ultrabolshevism" critique
anticipates merleau-ponty-1968-visible-and-invisible — three ways: (a) the chiasm 1953 Valéry-mediated social-register attestation (Course Summary [11]; L3 [43]; L5 [54]); (b) the Sartre/Parain Appendix [167]v Stiftung-question — "how is there a traditionality, a reactivation which is easier than Stiftung?" — points directly to V&I's institution-project; (c) the a-focalism / pre-objective-language coinage at Appendix [168]v foreshadows V&I's "flesh of language"
anticipates merleau-ponty-1961-eye-and-mind — the L6 [70] "extraordinary time of expression" and the L6 [78] "Body of the Mind" thread the temporality-of-creative-work line that Eye and Mind will develop for painting
contests Sartre's What is Literature? / "Aller et retour" — sustained throughout (L4 anti-impossibility; L6 anti-pure-words-as-things; L7 anti-permanent-revolution premise; L8 anti-Baudelaire existential reduction; Appendix [162]–[168]v anti-antithetic in language theory)
applies Saussurean diacriticality to Valéry's "mystical union" — L6 [64]–[66]; structurally parallel to the Thursday course's extension of Saussurean diacriticality to perception
is a middle term between *Prose of the World* and *V&I* — the 1953–55 transition zone; carries Valéry-implex + Saussurean-diacritical + Stiftung-institution-question forward
enacts lateral universality — MP's method of "taking author beyond himself" (Valéry-and-Stendhal "the way he reads Husserl") is itself an instance of lateral universality
shares mechanism with merleau-ponty-2020-sensible-world-expression — both 1953 courses use Saussurean diacriticality to dissolve a "miracle" diagnosis (sound-sense union in Monday; perception-meaning union in Thursday); the diacritical move is the same operation at work in two registers
requires implex and expressivity — the conquering-language thesis presupposes both as operative apparatus

Sources

merleau-ponty-2026-literary-use-language — this source. English translation: Bryan Smyth (Northwestern UP, 2026); French original ed. Benedetta Zaccarello & Emmanuel de Saint Aubert (Métis Presses, 2013). BNF NAF 26994, Vol. XI of Fonds "don 92-21 de Suzanne Merleau-Ponty." Raw extraction note at wiki/sources/.extraction-merleau-ponty-2026-literary-use-language.md.