Browse — tag · expression
Tag: expression
Pages tagged with expression.
67 pages
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Action at a Distance
The governing figure of the Introduction to Signs (1960). Action at a distance names the relation that holds between philosophy and politics, philosophy and history, and between thought and its "outside" generally: neither subordination (H…
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Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949–1952
Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) Year: 2010 (English, Welsh trans.) / 2001 (Verdier French ed.) / Lectures delivered 1949–1952 Type: lecture-course
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Co-Naissance
A portmanteau from Paul Claudel's Art poétique (1907) that fuses naissance (birth) with connaissance (knowledge): to know is to be co-born. Merleau-Ponty adopts this concept from his earliest work (The Structure of Behavior, 1942) through…
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Coherent Deformation
Malraux's term, transformed by Merleau-Ponty into the universal form of expressive operation. Coherent deformation is what happens when a style — a painter's, a writer's, a culture's — reorganizes the available system of signs "by affectin…
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Conférences en Amérique, notes de cours et autres textes — Inédits II (1947–1949)
Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) Year: notes 1947–1949 (composition); 2022 (posthumous critical edition) Type: notes (manuscript notes for course, conferences, and reading-notes)
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Conquering Language (langage conquérant)
Merleau-Ponty's name for speech that 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 put…
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Correctness of Names (Orthotēs Onomatōn)
The question the Cratylus is built around: what makes this the right name for that? Plato stages two answers — Hermogenes' conventionalism (a name is correct by agreement) and Cratylus' naturalism (each name names by nature) — and through…
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Cratylus
Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. C.D.C. Reeve, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue
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Double-Sided Artifact
A heuristic distinction articulated by Décarie-Daigneault (2024), drawing on Philippe Grosos's Des profondeurs de nos cavernes (2021): an artifact understood as combining two sides — voluntary expression + collateral trace — both of which…
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Embodied Act of Framing
Lisa van Sorge's (2025) signature concept and the constructive thesis of her synthesis of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida for a contemporary phenomenological aesthetics. Embodied act of framing names painting reread as the embodied subject's two…
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Engagement through Disengagement
Merleau-Ponty's marginal phrase at L6 [80] of Investigations into the Literary Use of Language (1953): "Engagement through disengagement. (the l'Académie Française episode)." Initially glossing Valéry's late acceptance of life (in particul…
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Expressive Will (poussée, drive to speak)
The affective and volitional substrate of lateral universality in Merleau-Ponty's account of language. Linguistic universality is not first a structural-conceptual feature shared by languages; it is a drive (poussée) of speaking subjects w…
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Expressivity (expressivité)
Merleau-Ponty's name for the operation by which a phenomenon's internal arrangement indicates another phenomenon — at the perceptual register (the Thursday course 1953 definition: "the property that a phenomenon has through its internal ar…
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Figuratifs
Merleau-Ponty's cardinal late-manuscript concept (1959-1960) for the non-figural conditions of visibility: fond, ombre, horizon, profondeur, silence, reflet, relief, éclairage, niveau. These are not figures and not nothing — they are what…
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Francis Ponge
French poet, theorist of the parti pris des choses (siding-with-things). Author of Le parti pris des choses (1942), Méthodes (1961), and the prose-poems "Notes pour un coquillage," "Le Galet," "La Pluie," "Le Cageot," "L'Orange," "L'Huître…
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From encountering foreign languages to the language of phenomenology: Merleau-Ponty and *The Problem of Speech*
Author(s): Hayden Kee Year: 2025 Type: paper (peer-reviewed journal article, Continental Philosophy Review 58: 75–97)
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From Johann to Maurice: Science and Expression in the Philosophical Praxis of Medicine
Author(s): Timm Heinbokel Year: 2021 (Human Studies 44(4): 559–579, Open Access CC BY 4.0; accepted 3 August 2021, published online 18 October 2021) Type: paper (peer-reviewed journal article; theoretical / philosophical)
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Gestural Expression
Merleau-Ponty's Sorbonne-period doctrine (chapter 8 of Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 1951–52) of the body as the medium of intersubjectivity through gesture: "the body inhabited by meaning"; "to perceive the other is to decipher a languag…
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Grain du sensible
Merleau-Ponty's concept for the optimum at which perception stops exploration and adheres — the écart between my body and the perceived that makes the perceived inépuisable but present. The grain is what arrests the caress, what defines th…
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H_synth re-audit on its original textual basis (E&M + PoP + Indirect Language + Saint Aubert 2021)
> Status note (2026-05-07). This question page was written when claims#science-secrete-stiftung-chiasm was live. The claim's status changed from live to contested on 2026-05-05 (Phase 8 eighth run; user-adjudicated Option γ — the α–δ split…
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Hayden Kee
Phenomenologist working primarily on Merleau-Ponty, language, and embodied / enactive cognition. Author of "From encountering foreign languages to the language of phenomenology: Merleau-Ponty and The Problem of Speech" (Continental Philoso…
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Hermeneutical Reverie
Merleau-Ponty's name for the method proper to the understanding of the positive symbol — a mode of philosophical attention that neither decodes (Freud) nor unmasks (Sartre) but accompanies the echoing of meaning through totality. "Method p…
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Horizons of Language (vs. Limits)
Kee 2025's reformulation of Merleau-Ponty's anti-relativist response in the early 1950s and PbP: against Wittgenstein's "the limits of my language are the limits of my world," MP holds that the horizons of my language are the horizons of m…
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Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology
Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty; edited by Leonard Lawlor with Bettina Bergo Year: 2002 (course delivered 1959–60; notes preserved at Bibliothèque Nationale) Type: Course notes + editorial apparatus
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Imperfecting Expression
David Morris's signature deformation of Smolin's neo-Leibnizian principle ("maximize difference, against identity of indiscernibles"). Morris's principle: "The principle isn't maximizing difference but 'imperfecting expression'" (morris-20…
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Imposture (three-fold, MP's reading of Valéry)
Merleau-Ponty's name (drawn from Valéry but systematized) for the three constitutive deceptions of literary writing diagnosed in lectures 4–5 of Investigations into the Literary Use of Language (1953): (1) the writer is mastered by what hi…
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Indirect Language
Merleau-Ponty's thesis (developed in "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence," 1952, and in "On the Phenomenology of Language," 1951) that all language is indirect and allusive — that "the idea of a complete expression is nonsensical"…
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Indirect or Objective Lyricism
Ramon Fernandez's term, enthusiastically endorsed by Merleau-Ponty in the 1953 Collège course The Literary Use of Language (Lecture 14): "a way of arousing emotion which involves showing facts, things, without saying their effect." Three e…
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Innere Sprachform
Wilhelm von Humboldt's German technical term — innere Sprachform, "inner form of language" — taken up by Merleau-Ponty via Kurt Goldstein's Language and Language Disturbances (1948) as a name for the global articulating structure of a lang…
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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 translatio…
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Involuntary Literature
Merleau-Ponty's name for what Stendhal "stumbles into" in his Journal (1804–05) — the discovery, "spontaneously and almost unknowingly," of internal monologue as the technique that resolves the life-impasse of cynicism-vs-rapture. Not Roma…
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Le problème de la parole. Cours au Collège de France, Notes, 1953-1954
Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty Year: Course delivered 3 December 1953 – April 1954; manuscript published 2020 (MétisPresses, Genève) Type: lecture-course (Collège de France preparatory notes) Citation scheme: BNF foliotage [N] followed b…
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Lived Gestural Expression
Merleau-Ponty's most condensed Sorbonne-period statement on bodily expression as the medium of intersubjectivity, articulated in chapter 8 of Child Psychology and Pedagogy (1951–52). The cardinal thesis: "To perceive the other is to deciph…
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Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy
Author(s): Emmanuel Alloa, Frank Chouraqui, Rajiv Kaushik (eds.) Year: 2019 Type: Edited volume (14 essays + epilogue), SUNY Press
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Merleau-Ponty Between Philosophy and Symbolism: The Matrixed Ontology
Author(s): Rajiv Kaushik Year: 2019 Type: book (SUNY Press, Contemporary Continental Philosophy)
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Merleau-Ponty's Poetic of the World: Philosophy and Literature
Author(s): Galen A. Johnson, Mauro Carbone, Emmanuel de Saint Aubert Year: 2020 Type: Book (co-authored, Fordham University Press, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series)
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Metaphoricity
A term developed by Emmanuel de Saint Aubert (Poetic of the World, Ch 5) to name the carnal-ontological capacity for analogy that grounds all linguistic metaphor in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. Metaphor is not a semantic transfer between pr…
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Nachverstehen
Husserl's term from "The Origin of Geometry" (HUA 371), taken up by Merleau-Ponty in his 1959–60 course as naming a mode of understanding that is fundamentally different from reactivation. Reactivation aims at total survey — "reactivating…
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Nascent State (état naissant)
Merleau-Ponty's recurring formulation in Phenomenology of Perception for the moment-just-before-objectification — the layer at which sense, perception, time, language, or freedom is being born without yet having been constituted as an obje…
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Non-Identity-Based Sense
Inkpin's coinage for the mode of sense-realization in which particulars (works) matter as such and are balanced with — but not reduced to — generality (style). Coined as the structural counterpart to Husserlian identity-based sense, where…
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Painting as an Embodied Act of Framing: Toward a Phenomenological Aesthetics with Merleau-Ponty and Derrida
Author(s): Lisa van Sorge (Tilburg University) Year: 2025 (Accepted 22 April 2025; Published online 25 July 2025) Type: paper (Open Access, CC-BY-4.0; journal not stated in extracted PDF metadata)
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Phaedrus
Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Alexander Nehamas & Paul Woodruff, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue
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Pharmakon
The word pharmakon — "remedy" and "poison," "drug," "charm" — under which Plato's Phaedrus stages its critique of writing, and which Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy" (in Dissemination) makes the lever for deconstructing the speech/writing hier…
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Philosophical Praxis of Medicine
Heinbokel's positive thesis (2021) for what medicine can become once its use of science is subjected to phenomenological analysis under the description "coherent deformation." Medicine, on this reading, is not a hybrid (a phenomenology and…
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Primordial Expression
Every human use of the body is already expression. This thesis, stated most explicitly in The Prose of the World, grounds Merleau-Ponty's entire theory of creative expression — painting, literature, speech, philosophy — in the body's capac…
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Processioning (paysage)
David Morris's neologism for the temporal-distributive structure of quantum-mechanical dynamics, replacing the wavefunction-realist image of "guiding-branching" as a process spatially distributed alongside the apparatus. In English, a "pro…
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Quasi-Natural Signification
Merleau-Ponty's phrase at The Problem of Speech (PbP) p. 199, revisited in the third Nature course of 1959–60: an "order of quasi-natural significations" of language — the breakdown of the strict bifurcation between the natural sign (whose…
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Saussurean Diacriticality
The thesis Merleau-Ponty draws from Saussure — that signs are "negative, diacritical, conventional" and that "in operating on each other they constitute a structure that is homologous to that of the signified" — used at the 1953 Collège co…
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Science as Coherent Deformation
The application of Merleau-Ponty's coherent-deformation to the scientific gaze itself — and to scientific writings such as neuropsychological case reports — as a styled deformation of the world that opens a new field of investigations with…
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Sedimentation
Husserl's term, taken over and reinterpreted by Merleau-Ponty: the process by which an initially creative expressive act becomes a stable "acquired" meaning available to further expression. Sedimentation is the structural condition of all…
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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)
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Silence
Silence in Merleau-Ponty is not absence of language but its structural ground — the horizon from which speech emerges, the tacit dimension that makes the said possible. Across the corpus, silence names a family of registers (perceptual, pa…
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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 significati…
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Stiftung
Husserl's word — "foundation," "establishment," "institution" — for the operation by which a singular event (the Urstiftung) opens a temporal dimension along which subsequent experiences acquire meaning, are handed down (the Nachstiftung)…
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Strong Beauty
Strong beauty is an event, not a quality — a radically unanticipable apparitional moment characterized by opacity, imprevisibility, and an intensity akin to pain. The concept, developed by Galen A. Johnson and Veronique Foti drawing on Mer…
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Surrection
A metaphorical figure developed in Merleau-Ponty's late work and analyzed extensively by Emmanuel de Saint Aubert (Poetic of the World, Ch 2). Surrection names the vertical emergence through which desire's insurrections and resurrections d…
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Texture imaginaire du réel
Merleau-Ponty's cardinal formula for the ontological structure that the real itself is through and through woven with imaginary dimensions. Coined in L'Œil et l'Esprit (OE p. 24, 1961), the formula is the chapter-title and organizing thesi…
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The Mask
In Beyond Good and Evil the mask is both a recurrent theme and the book's own method. "All that is profound loves a mask" (§40); "Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, a mask is continuously growing around every profound spirit th…
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The Prose of the World
Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty; edited by Claude Lefort; translated by John O'Neill Year: Written ~1950-52; published posthumously 1969 (French) / 1973 (English) Type: book (unfinished)
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The Sensible World and the World of Expression
Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty; translated with introduction and notes by Bryan Smyth Year: 1953 (course delivered); 2011 (French publication); 2020 (English translation) Type: Course notes (personal lecture notes + working notes)
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The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Ponty's A-Philosophy
Author(s): Mauro Carbone Year: 2004 Type: book (commentary; collection of reworked essays)
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Truth is Poetry (le vrai est poésie)
Merleau-Ponty's organizing thesis for the fourteenth lecture of Investigations into the Literary Use of Language (1953): "The truth is in essence poetic, [it] is found only in fiction, – which is not unreal or arbitrary" (L11 [118]). With…
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Verflechtung
Husserl's term (verflochten, "interwoven") from "The Origin of Geometry" (HUA 370), adopted by Merleau-Ponty in his 1959–60 course notes as naming the triadic interweaving of man, world, and language — "a thick identity which truly contain…
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Wild Structure and Melting Time: On Quantum Mechanics and Matter as Change in Merleau-Ponty's Temporal Ontology
Author: David Morris (Concordia University) Year: 2024 Type: paper (journal article) Journal: Chiasmi International 26 (2024), pp. 157-173. DOI: 10.5840/chiasmi20242616
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Writing and Living
Merleau-Ponty's name for the relation between the writer's vocation and the writer's life, and for the quadruple-negation thesis through which the relation is articulated: writing is neither end nor means, neither cause nor effect of life…
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Être et chair II. L'épreuve perceptive de l'être
Author: Emmanuel de Saint Aubert Year: 2021 Type: Book (French, untranslated) Publisher: Paris: Vrin, « Bibliothèque d'histoire de la philosophie » ISBN: 978-2-7116-3021-9
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Être humain est un parti / To Be Human Is Also to Take a Side
Stendhal's phrase from the Lucien Leuwen marginalia, picked up by Merleau-Ponty as the closing political-philosophical thesis of Investigations into the Literary Use of Language (1953). The thesis: the writer's engagement is intrinsic to t…