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EmmanuEl alloa

The diacriTical naTure of meaning:merleau-PonTy wiTh saussure

1. Spacings

In The Infinite Conversation, Maurice Blanchot offered the following definition of what a conversation consists of:

when two people speak together, they speak not together, but each in turn: one says something, then stops, the other something else (or the same thing), then stops. The coherent discourse they carry on is composed of sequences that are interrupted when the conversation moves from partner to partner, even if adjustments are made so that they correspond to one another. The fact that speech needs to pass from one interlocutor to another in order to be confirmed, contradicted, or developed shows the necessity of interval.1

However fluent a conversation, Blanchot suggests, its very fluency is but the result of permanent interruptions. Just as a continuous vision constitutively rests on the steady, although unnoticed “blink” of the lid which regularly humidifies the eye, even the most fluid conversations require intervals, blanks and silences. An incessantly monologuing, garrulous stream of words – the ‘logorrhea’ – would certainly not be more coherent; it would be fairly incomprehensible. Without interruption, no possibility for the word to circulate; without silence, no meaning.

For the sake of understanding, the interlocutor unavoidably needs to restrain its own potential and “air” his or her speech, hence leaving holes and latencies in the stream of words. For the “discourse” to flow, the natural “course” of utterance has to be interjected, spaced, disjoined (from Lat. discurro, dis- “tearing apart” and currere “run”). Yet, most of the time these pauses in the middle of the ongoing conversation, and even within a speaker’s sentence, go largely unnoticed, just as the blink of the lid remains unperceived and does not interrupt the impression of continuous vision. But at times these shards of silence that grant rhythm to any meaningful speech grow and solidify into clumps that can hardly be overlooked any longer: silence itself becomes significant, is invested with meaning. Blanchot recalls the marvelously odd interrogation which once struck Franz Kafka when he eventually asked himself “at what moment and how many times, when eight people are seated within the horizon of a conversation, it is appropriate to speak if one does not wish to be considered silent.”2 In such a case, silence becomes an imperative for the word to be seized, it literally calls forth an interruption of the interruption. But whether those patches of silence only shape meaning or constitute a meaning

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of their own, they manifest in an irrefutable way why silence is not the opposite of speech; it is always and inevitably part of it.

In one of his late working notes, Merleau-Ponty (who – this said in passing – had commissioned from Blanchot several texts for Les Temps modernes) describes the dialogical situation in a very similar fashion: “A dialogue: it is the words that call for words, my answers are called forth by the lacunas of the discourse held to me, the sentence I hear and ‘understand’, I understand it because it fills a certain void.”3

Any meaningful conversation bears resemblance to the movement of a “shuttlecock”, going back and forth, because there are gaps and spaces in the fabric of speech and meaning is not entirely given in the utterance, but “supposes in the listener a creative reenactment of what is heard.”4

What holds true for the phenomenon of shared speech – the necessity of pauses and silences – is however by no means restricted to it. This paper would like to have a look at some of the processes of the emergence of meaning as described by Merleau-Ponty in various fields of sensory articulation and his insistence on negativity as the crucial constituent of sense. As it shall be argued, Merleau-Ponty develops, through an early reading of Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics (he is arguably among the first within French philosophy), a conception of meaning which is not thought anymore in terms of referentiality, but in terms of immanent diacritical articulation.

2. Saussure or the discovery of the diacritical

“What we have learned from Saussure” so the opening lines of Merleau-Ponty’s Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence go, “is that, taken singly, signs do not signify anything, and that each one of them does not so much express a meaning as mark a divergence of meaning between itself and other signs.”5 For a general theory of meaning, the Saussurean linguistics represent indeed a major breakthrough, as they show why the sign has no value as such, but receives its meaning negatively through its relation to all the others.

In English, for instance, the utterance /dog/ is used to refer to a class of four-legged creatures, but in other languages, other signifiers may be used (chien, Hund, perro, cane…) which are equally arbitrary. The utterance /dog/ means dog not because it would have some intrinsic relationship to some four-legged creatures out there in the world, but because it does not mean ‘cat’, ‘horse’, ‘ladder’ or ‘freedom’. Linguistic meaning is discovered as “that domain whose doors, it is believed, open only from within”6 and therefore, linguistic values will be “defined not positively, in terms of their content, but negatively by contrast with other terms in the same system. What characterizes each most exactly is being whatever the others are not.”7 From this observation, the Cours de linguistique générale, edited posthumously by his pupils in 1916, concludes the intrinsic negativity and differentiality of linguistic meaning:

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In the language itself, there are only differences. Even more important than that is the fact that, although in general a difference presupposes positive terms between which the difference holds, in a language there are only differences, and no positive terms. Whether we take the signifier or the signified, the language includes neither ideas nor sounds existing prior to the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonetic differences arising out of that system. In a sign, what matters more than any idea or sound associated with it is what other signs surround it.8

Consequently, meaning emerges not from substantial, but from lateral relationship: in this respect, /book/ differs from /bike/, /bake/, /beak/, /buck/, /booked/ etc., and depending on the context it may mean an object containing a drama or the action of reserving a seat for the theater where this drama is staged. The materiality of the signifier is irrelevant, just as it is irrelevant – to take one of Saussure’s favorite examples – whether on a chess board the knight is carved out of ivory, stone or plastic; what is solely relevant is its position with respect to all the others. As such, the exact position of the knight within the rectangle doesn’t matter; it should just be clear that it does not stand in the next one.

The same applies to language: any language makes allowances for differences of pronunciation (Saussure talks of the phenomenon of “fluctuation”), even for mistakes, mispronunciations or misspellings, as long as one signifier is clearly distinguishable from another. Whereas in German, the r may be rolled by some regional speakers (such as in Bavaria or Franconia), this does not alter the value of the phoneme, as the same goes for French when Jacques Brel rolls the r in his songs, while the Portuguese spoken in Portugal distinguishes the guttural and the rolled r as two different phonemes which have to be used distinctly with respect to their position within the word. The point is thus not whether the demarcation line is drawn, but rather where. While Japanese speakers will have difficulties distinguishing rocks from locks, their native – tonal – language is highly sensitive to pitches; while Spanish speakers often encounter problems differentiating bets and vets, they tend to be more sensitive to syllabic stressing, as according to the accentuation, sabana may either refer to the savannah (sabána) or to a bed sheet (sábana).

Now unlike the example of the chess game, the demarcations in the interplay of signs – and this is what shall be in our focus from now on – do not precede the game. There is no immovable board on which any potential position is indicated as well as the outside of the game; the demarcations as such are invisible and subject to time as well as to the transformation of linguistic and cultural practices (For instance, one could mention the fact that under the influence of Brazilian Portuguese, the difference between the two types of r progressively tends to fade in Portuguese spoken in Portugal today). Or as Merleau-Ponty puts it: Language “is far less a table of statements which satisfy well-formed thoughts than a swarm of gestures all occupied with differentiating themselves from one another and blending again.”9 Just as language can be considered as a form of gesture, gesturing itself manifests

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the same diacritic structure as language: Just like “phonemes, which have no meaning by themselves, expressive gestures have a diacritical value: they announce the constitution of a symbolical system capable of redesigning an infinite number of situations.”10 Any linguistic meaning as such must be articulated along a diacritical structure: “Considered moment to moment, the linguistic phenomenon is never anything but negative, diacritic.”11

But how to think of this invariant which, from within the space of phonemes and morphemes, ensures their recognizability throughout their variations? How to think of these lines of demarcation structuring the field of signification which, as such, do not appear?

3. “Écart”. From Mallarmé’s blank page to structural linguistics In quite a genial move, Merleau-Ponty has given this basic Saussurean

insight a name, where the father of modern linguistics had not provided it with one. Repeating a gesture quite characteristic of his reading of other authors, Merleau-Ponty singles out an aspect and presents it in such a way that it becomes undecidable whether the paternity of its discovery belongs to the commentator or rather to the commented. In the case of Saussure, Merleau-Ponty considers that his basic insight is the idea of the “diacritic” nature of language, and, in many occasions throughout his work, he will use this concept while crediting the Geneva linguist for its invention.

Yet, if browsing through Saussure’s works known to Merleau-Ponty, but also through the later published Writings on General Linguistics, one has to acknowledge that the “diacritical” never appears as a concept in its own right.12 As Richard Kearney has already underscored, in the Collège de France Lecture of 1953 Merleau-Ponty will eventually credit another author for the discovery as well: Paul Valéry.13 But unlike the concept of “chiasm” and its optical, rhetorical as well as intersubjective interlacing, which indeed goes back to Valéry’s text entitled Choses tues, Valéry does not conceptualize the “diacritical” either, neither in his published writings nor in his Cahiers as far as they were known to Merleau-Ponty. Or rather, if a connection were to be made – but we are fated to a mere conjecture here – it might be through Valéry’s reading of Mallarmé and his material poem Coup de dé.

Valéry was indeed among the first to highlight the importance of the visual organization of the poem and the distribution of the “white spaces” – the blancs, in Mallarmé’s terminology. Rather than relying on the intrinsic meaning of the words, it is first of all their peculiar arrangement on the space of the page – their constellation on the void of the paper – which allows for the poetic to surge forth. Thanks to the spacing of the voids, “everything is suspended, a fragmentary disposition with alternations and oppositions, all working towards the total rhythm, which would be to the silenced poem, of the white spaces.”14 Arousing the reader’s attention to the importance of those

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white spaces structuring the poem will eventually prepare him for grasping the importance of holes and gaps for the process of thinking:

But a page, in his system – being addressed to the glance that precedes and surrounds the act of reading – should ‘notify’ the movement of the composition. By providing a sort of material intuition and by establishing a harmony among our various modes of perception, or among the rates of our different senses [entre les différences de marche de nos sens], it should make us anticipate what is about to be presented to the intelligence.15

It goes without saying that the blanc need not be white. Mallarmé even thought to inverse the order when, in his strife for a constellatory and thus “stellar” writing, he talks of the “astral alphabet” of the nightly sky, where the constellations appear in white on the grounds of a dark firmament.16 The blanc is not operative because it is white, but because it is a differentiating matrix. Whether this were the reason or not, at any rate Merleau-Ponty chose, for describing this operative differentiator, another name than the blanc, the name of a concept taken from the field of phonetics: that of the “diacritical”.

Diacritical signs are peculiar signs since, while being regulating utterances, they cannot be uttered themselves; while being operators of articulation, they cannot in turn become the subject of articulation. Determining the value of vowels in Ancient languages like Classical Greek or Latin, they are not vowels themselves, but rather come from the side and alter the vocalic value. Written in the margins of the letters, above, beneath or beside them, they provoke their alteration in terms of accentuation or tone. Sometimes, such as in Classical Greek, they were even used to turn a letter into a numeral. The basic function is however to determine the value of a sign and hence to exclude those possibilities that are not pertinent. As it were, the term diacritical would thus to be understood etymologically as that “through which” (dia) a “distinction” (diakrisis) is to be made. The diacritical markers hence operate marginally, from the divide between signs, not so much attributing a signification to a sign than “dividing” possibilities, excluding significations. As it seems, the most precise definition of his understanding of Saussure is probably given by Merleau-Ponty in the following remark:

Saussure admits that the language is essentially diacritic: words do not so much carry a meaning than they exclude other meanings [les mots portent moins un sens qu’ils n’en écartent d’autres].17

Merleau-Ponty is playing here on the double sense of écarter as both excluding and spacing, producing a gap (écart). In the same way that the signs only receive their specification from without, the diacritical markers are only ever operative when inserted into the field of signs. It would be a meaningless endeavor to try abstracting the diacritical markers and determining their value, as they only exist when put in perspective. The only reference to the diacritical we find in the Cours de linguistique générale which Merleau-

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Ponty studied extensively is, if not pertinent for a conceptualization of the term, at least revealing on the impossibility of having something like a general, decontextualized writing for all languages: “an alphabet applicable to all languages would probably be weighed down by diacritical marks; and to say nothing of the distressing appearance of such a page – attempts to gain precision would obviously confuse the reader by obscuring what the writing was designed to express.”18

As it becomes progressively clear, the issue of the diacritical cannot be addressed without addressing the question of its contextual field. What is the nature of the matter which the diacritical organizes? Is this a purely functional problem, restricted to issues of communication, as Saussure’s followers like Troubetzkoy or Martinet held? Or does Saussurianism open the way for a new ontological interrogation, as others suggest?19 Whether faithful to Saussure or not – he often indeed makes claims “that subtly devastate some of [Saussure’s] most basic premises”20 – one cannot but acknowledge that Merleau-Ponty went the way of an ontological questioning of the grounds of the diacritical and its discovery.

4. Merleau-Ponty: Ontologizing the diacritical

The issue of language and of the status of idealities has never been absent from Merleau-Ponty’s writings, and, as a matter of fact, large chapters are devoted in the Phenomenology of perception to creative speech and to the expressivity of gestures. But an often remarked dualism still traverses Merleau-Ponty’s first period: the contrast between the living body and the worldly objects looks like an only slightly modified version of Husserl’s consciousness pole and its noematic correlate. The self-criticism which sets in after 1945 is thus characterized by a reflection on the epistemological presuppositions of this polarity. A working note from the period of the Visible and the invisible is very explicit in this regard “The problems posed in Ph.P. are insoluble because I start there from the ‘consciousness’-‘object’ distinction.”21 And in another unpublished working note, he writes “Our corporeity: don’t put it at the center as I did in Ph.P: in a sense, it is only the hinge of the world, its weight is only that of the world. It is but the power of a divergence [écart] from the world.”22

While this self-criticism and the ontological turn it produced in the 50s have been widely discussed, I want to argue than a decisive piece in the puzzle would be missing if this turn were only presented as a revision internal to Husserlian phenomenology. In order to explain the turn that took place in the years after the publication of the Phenomenology of perception, commentators have mainly drawn on the latest texts between 1959 and 1961, largely underestimating what happened between 1945 and 1952, that is, Merleau-Ponty’s election at the Collège de France. Even if the philological basis is still problematic today,23 a simple glance at Merleau-Ponty course titles gives an insight into Merleau-Ponty’s preoccupations: In Lyon, he dedicates a course

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in 1947-48 to “Language and communication”, while the announcement of his class at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1948 simply reads “Saussure”. A year later, he teaches a class on “Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language” at the Sorbonne and immediately afterwards, if we are to believe Claude Lefort’s Preface, starts to work on the manuscript which will be published posthumously as The Prose of the World in 1964. At the first Colloque international de phénomenologie in Royaumont in 1951, Merleau-Ponty’s topic will be the phenomenology of language.

“In the philosophical tradition” Merleau-Ponty admits, “the problem of language does not pertain to ‘first philosophy’.”24 Yet, language and the problem of embodied generality or ideality that it carries with it cannot be a topic of some regional philosophy or a merely technical issue. Rather, it serves as a vector allowing for addressing all the issues the primacy of the single body in the Phenomenology of perception made difficult to tackle. The general ontology of the chiasm – which, as Ted Toadvine compellingly argued, has to be understood as an ontology of the “écart”25 – could not have been conceptualized, as it were, without the confrontation with the phenomenon of linguistic ideality and its theorists.

Among the different linguists he refers to, like Vendryès, Bühler and in particular Jakobson, to whom I shall return later on, Saussure plays an exceptional role. While the first mention in 1947 is still very evasive,26 in his inaugural address at the Collège de France in 1953 Merleau-Ponty ventures so far as to say that Saussure’s “theory of signs” provided a sounder basis for the philosophy of history than the thought of Hegel or Marx.27 This broadens the perspective beyond the range of the singular body meant to take into account all forms of “action at a distance”28 of which linguistic operations are an emblematic example. Entering the field of linguistic expression means to be part of a field much larger than that of my perception, a field which came to be before my birth and will continue to exist after my death. Speaking and writing is being part of a community which reaches out to what is not present. And yet, it must take place in some sort of field. With his conception of synchronic and diachronic differences, says Merleau-Ponty, Saussure has provided a model for a better understanding of what Husserl meant with his few “original and enigmatic” remarks on linguistic ideality.29

At the outset of his 1949 course on the acquisition of language, Merleau-Ponty announces a meditation on the “being of language” (être du langage).30 As we shall see, this meditation on the ontological dimension of language sketched here will become the emblem of a renewed attention to the problem of the perceived world. It is not, as Ricoeur once inappropriately remarked, that Merleau-Ponty did not take the long and necessary “detour” by way of linguistics;31 he took that detour, and it was necessary to him to make a different return to the issues of the sensible dimension of existence outlined in the Phenomenology of Perception.

“To perceive a physiognomy, an expression”, says Merleau-Ponty in the lecture notes of his course Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression,

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“is always to use diacritical signs.”32 This should not make Merleau-Ponty an advocate of a general readability of the world (H. Blumenberg), but rather the opposite. The diacritical operation and the determination of significance do not start with standardized propositional language, but already at the level of perception.

Consider sensation itself, the act of sensing, as the intervention of a figure on a ground. Modulation. As a sound modulates silence. As a color modulates an open space by varying it. Every sign is diacritical.33

Just as Saussure considered the differential nature between phonemes and morphemes to be just a matter of level, Merleau-Ponty will consider the diacritical differentiality as basically present both on the linguistic and on the perceptual level. Perception itself is a “diacritical, relative, oppositional system”34 and sensorial fields themselves represent “diacritical systems.”35 Rather than being centered on my body which would reach – as Bergson’s famous metaphor has it – from here to the stars, the sensible appears according to a deviation from a norm which is “never given as such”, but only ever “shines through” (transparaît).36 Without the diacritical, there would be no scansion, everything would be inarticulate.37 What Merleau-Ponty hence credits Saussure for is the shift from a notion of meaning as attached to identical substances to meaning as a differential process which concedes to negativity all its due importance: meaning is not an “essence, or if it is, not primarily. Sense as deviation (as a ‘diacritical’).”38 As he will say in Nature and the World of Silence, philosophy would have to write a “theory of perception as divergence”.39 The diacritical systems of language, says Merleau-Ponty, continue the diacritical differentiation of the sensible; they “formulate, beyond those of the sensible, the operation of those of the sensible.”40

In the Visible and the invisible, this diacritical differentiality will be applied to the famous analysis of the patch of red color: Invoking the range of all possible reds, from the gatekeepers of the Revolution, to tiled rooftops and colored gypsie’s dresses on the Champs Elysées to the reddish earth of Madagascar’s fields, Merleau-Ponty affirms that red is nothing in itself. Red is not a

chunk of absolutely hard, indivisible being, offered all naked to a vision which could only total or null, but is rather a sort of straits between exterior horizons and interior horizons ever gaping open, something that comes to touch lightly and makes diverse regions of the colored or visible world resound at the distances, a certain differentiation, an ephemeral modulation of this world – less a color or a thing, therefore, than a difference between things and colors.41

A few lines later, Merleau-Ponty gives this diacritical scaffolding of the sensible a name: “la chair”, flesh.

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Between the alleged colors and visibles, we could find anew the tissue that lines them, sustains them, nourishes them, and which for its part is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and a flesh of things.42

As is well known, the notion of flesh (“la chair”) will become crucial in the late writings, in order to name the sensible element in which the differentiation of sense takes place. As I have tried arguing elsewhere, I believe it is therefore not incongruous to consider the Flesh to represent the both embodied and ontologized version of Saussure’s diacritics.43 In the framework of this article, I shall thus leave out the question of what this implies for the late ontology of the sensible and for an understanding of the notion of Flesh from the perspective not of homogeneity, but of differentiality.44 For the last section of this paper, I would instead like to explore yet another point of view, which would be that of a “genetic” perspective of the diacritical. As a matter of fact, in the years during which he lectures on pedagogy at the Sorbonne, and parallel to his reading of Saussure, Merleau-Ponty extensively takes up the works by Roman Jakobson, the structuralist phonologist and main figure of the Circle of Prague. I shall argue that, on the grounds of the empirical evidence provided by Jakobson with regard to children’s acquisition of language, the discovery of the capacity of meaningful speech amounts to a discovery of the capacity of diacritical articulation and vice versa.

5. Babel or how not to speak

Forced into exile, the linguist Roman Jakobson worked in Sweden, between 1939 and 1941, on an essay which would later be published under the title Kindersprache, Aphasie und universale Lautgesetze or, as the English title goes, Child Language, Aphasia and Phonological Universals.45 Merleau-Ponty will consider Jakobson’s work as one of the most fecund continuations of Saussure’s heritage and will widely avail himself of Jakobson’s analyses in his lectures on the acquisition of language at the Sorbonne. Let me spoil, before I go into details, the key idea of Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation: learning to speak – that would be the stake – is learning how not to speak.

A traditional view of education holds that, through learning, the infant will become able to do things that it could not do before. According to Jakobson, quite the reverse is true. The infant is not an infans, that is, quite literally, a being incapable of speech; it rather produces a continuous speech known as “babbling”. While testing the range of their phonatory capacities, children display an astonishing variety of sound productions that could never be found in one single language. With reference to another pedolinguist, Jakobson goes so far as to say that “the child at the height of his babbling period ‘is capable of producing all conceivable sounds’.”46 In his “purposeless egocentric soliloquy”, the child performs a kind of incessant glossolalia, a “tongue delirium”, which allows him to discover his phonatory capacities, but shuts him off from a shared

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world of meaning.47 Slowly, however, the child will adopt the phonatory flow, learn to identify sounds and recurrent elements which will then be eagerly appropriated and reused. This implies though that the deafening babbling be interrupted or “deflated”, as Jakobson says:

In place of the phonetic abundance of babbling, the phonemic poverty of the first linguistic stages appears, a kind of deflation which transforms the so-called ‘wild sounds’ of the babbling period into entities of linguistic value.48

From a continuous flow, the child discovers how to articulate, that is to differentiate the phonematic flux through silences. Or as Merleau-Ponty puts it: “The phonemic system draws signification as if through the interstices [en creux].”49

Now the striking feature of language acquisition is that that the child may only acquire the capacity of speaking a shared language by losing its general phonatory capacity, which allows it to produce any given sound. “The child”, says Merleau-Ponty “ceases to be able to utter certain sounds as soon as he begins to speak, but this is due neither to some articulatory impossibility nor to the fact that he ceases to hear them.”50 By confronting his babbling with the speech of the adults, the child discovers the distinction between meaningful and meaningless sounds, henceforth discarding those sounds which would be in its phonatory range but cannot be shared with others. Learning to speak in an intersubjective context must thus mean, first of all, learning how to shape silences. As Merleau-Ponty summarizes Jakobson:

Here, there is what Jakobson calls a deflation: suddenly the richness of babbling disappears; the child loses not only the unused sounds in his language, but also many of those that would be very useful to him. Thus, the child who, in his babbling, differentiated perfectly his [k]s and his [t]s, all of a sudden loses the possibility of differentiating them, although he recognizes them very well when an adult speaks them. It is, therefore, not a question of motor or auditory models posing a problem for him. Everything happens as though the child were obliged to restrain himself, because sounds now take on a distinctive signification.51

The child’s capacity of speaking does not depend upon his capacity to produce sounds, but to produce voids; language acquisition does not consist in learning how to utter something, but in learning about contrasts and differences. Or to restate it yet more plainly: learning to speak is learning how not to speak.

In his inspired book Echolalias. On the Forgetting of Languages, Daniel Heller-Roazen has proposed a suggestive interpretation of Jakobson’s analysis. While being in line with Merleau-Ponty’s reading, one could argue that it takes Jakobson yet a step further.52 According to Heller-Roazen, the initial babbling would refer to the Biblical moment of Babel where all languages were spoken at once, in a general confusion of tongues. But in order to speak a single language, the possibility of speaking them all had to be given up. This will also mean that the emerging subject will become incapable of producing certain

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sounds in foreign languages; he will have to forget that he was capable of all in order to actualize the possibility of one. The postlapsarian situation of the fall into one language that will be considered the mother tongue is the result of a necessary forgetfulness; the loss of a limitless phonetic arsenal being the price the child has to pay for the papers that grant him citizenship in a single language.53

To put this yet somewhat differently, in a more Merleau-Pontian way: to be in an “intersubjective diacritical system”54 – in a shared field of meaning – allows for the subject to be someone or something, but this also means that his individuation is possible only as the result of a distancing from any return to the “originary”. L’originaire éclate, says Merleau-Ponty “the originary bursts forth” and it can be addressed only as the result of a retrojection ex post. Whether the projections of the originary nurture the hope of an initial plenitude or not, the world as we know is only meaningful because it is not fully determined; it is multi-faceted because it entails zones of indetermination. The prosaic nature of such a world is hence that it necessarily at once is: sense and non-sense.

Emmanuel Alloaemmanuel.alloa@unisg.ch

NOTES:

1 Maurice Blanchot, “Interruption, As on a Riemann surface,” The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993: 75.

2 Ibid.: 76.3 “Un dialogue: ce sont les mots qui appellant les mots, mes réponses sont appellees

par les lacunes du discours qu’on me tient, la phrase que j’entends et ‘comprends’, je la comprends parce qu’elle vient remplir un certain vide […]” BNF, Fonds Merleau-Ponty, vol. VIII.2 [148] (72b) (my translation)

4 Merleau-Ponty, “An Unpublished Text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: A Prospectus of His Work,” [1951], trans. A. B. Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception, p. 3-11: 8.

5 Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard McCleary, Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964: 39.6 Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” Signs, Evanston:

Northwestern UP 1964: 41.7 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, eds. Charles Bally and Albert

Séchehaye, trans. Roy Harris, La Salle: Open Court 1986: 115.8 Ibid.: 118.9 Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill, Evanston: Northwestern UP,

1973: 151.10 Merleau-Ponty, “An Unpublished Text,” The Primacy of Perception, ed. James Edie,

Evanston: Northwestern UP: 1964: 7.11 Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy. The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952,

trans. Talia Welsh, Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2010: 64.12 The only mention of the diacritical in the Writings on General Linguistics is the

following: “May be worth saying that in phonetic script a diacritic sign such as ợ? does not contravene the unidimensional principle, because a single seme is made up of the whole (not of parts).” (Ferdinand de Saussure, Writings on General Linguistics, ed.

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Simon Bouquet and Rudolf Engler, trans. Carol Sanders, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006: 76).

13 Merleau-Ponty, Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expérience, ed. Emmanuel de Saint-Aubert & Stefan Kristensen, Geneva: MētisPresses, 2011: 206. Richard Kearney, “What is Diacritical Hermeneutics?” in: Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 10 (December 2011): 7. See also Richard Kearney, “Diacritical Hermeneutics,” in: Hermeneutic Rationality, ed. María Luisa Portocarrero, Luís António Umbelino, Andrzej Wiercinski, Berlin: LIT 2012: 177-198.

14 Stéphane Mallarmé, “Crise de vers,” Œuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard 1961: 365. (my translation)

15 Paul Valéry, “Le coup de dés, lettre au directeur des Marges,” in Œuvres I: 627. (The Collected Works of Paul Valéry: Leonardo - Poe - Mallarmé, trans. Cowley and Lawler, Princeton UP 1971: 312).

16 Stéphane Mallarmé, “Quant au Livre,” in: Œuvres completes, Paris: Gallimard: 370. For more on this “constellatory” reading, see Muriel Pic & Emmanuel Alloa, “Lisibilité/Lesbarkeit,” Trivium, 10 (2012). http://trivium.revues.org/4230.

17 Merleau-Ponty, Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, trans. Hugh J. Silverman, Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973: 96 (modified translation).

18 Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, ed. Charles Bally & Albert Séchehaye, critical edition by Tullio de Mauro, Paris: Payot, 1972: 56 (my translation)

19 Patrice Maniglier, “L’ontologie du négatif,” Methodos [online] 7 (2007). http://methodos.revues.org/674. For a more in-depth analysis: Patrice Maniglier, La vie énigmatique des signes, Saussure et la naissance du structuralisme, Paris : Léo Scheer 2006.

20 Lawrence Hass, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2008: 186.21 Merleau-Ponty, The visible and the invisible, transl. Alphonso Lingis, Evanston:

Northwestern UP, 1968: 200. (Working note dated July 1959)22 Unpublished working note from the period from the Visible and the invisible, quoted

by Renaud Barbaras. Le tournant de l’expérience, Paris: Vrin 1998: 217. I could not identify this working note in the materials accessible today at the Fonds Merleau-Ponty.

23 We do not yet have access to many of the manuscripts of these years, as they are not yet deposited at the Fonds Merleau-Ponty of the Bibliothèque Nationale.

24 Merleau-Ponty, “On the phenomenology of language,” Signs, trans. Richard McCleary, Evanston: Northwestern UP 1964: 84.

25 Ted Toadvine, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature, Evanston: Northwestern UP 2009, chapter 5: „The Human-Nature Chiasm“.

26 Merleau-Ponty, “The Metaphysical in Man,” Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, Evanston: Northwestern UP 1964: 87.

27 Merleau-Ponty, In praise of philosophy, trans. James Edie and John Wild, Evanston: Northwestern UP 1963: 54-55.

28 Merleau-Ponty, “On the phenomenology of language,” Signs, trans. Richard McCleary, Evanston: Illinois 1964: 89.

29 Ibid.: 84.30 Merleau-Ponty, Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language: 10.31 Paul Ricoeur, “The Question of the Subject: The Challenge of Semiology,” trans.

Kathleen MacLaughlin, The conflict of interpretations, London: Continuum, 2000 : 244.

32 Merleau-Ponty, Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression: 203.33 Merleau-Ponty, Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression: 206.34 Working note 27 October 1959. The Visible and the invisible: 213.35 Merleau-Ponty, Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression: 118.36 Merleau-Ponty, Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression: 168.37 Merleau-Ponty, Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression: 201.38 Merleau-Ponty, Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression: 58.

173

39 Merleau-Ponty, La nature et le monde du silence, Unpublished Manuscript from Autumn 1957, Fonds Merleau-Ponty, vol. VI, f. 143. Quoted after Emmanuel de Saint-Aubert, “Introduction,” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ed. E. de Saint-Aubert, Paris: Hermann, 2008, p. 35.

40 Working note for plan and revision of Being and World. June 1959. Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Reader, ed. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor, Evanston: Northwestern UP 2007: 445.

41 Merleau-Ponty. The visible and the invisible: 132.42 Ibid.: 132-33.43 See my “La chair comme diacritique incarné,” in: Chiasmi International. Trilingual

Studies Concerning the Thought of Merleau-Ponty 11 (2009), 249-261.44 See my “Merleau-Ponty II: Fleisch und Differenz,” in: Leiblichkeit. Geschichte und

Aktualität eines Begriffs, ed. Emmanuel Alloa, Thomas Bedorf, Christian Grüny & Tobias Klass, Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck/UTB 2012.

45 Roman Jakobson, Kindersprache, Aphasie und Allgemeine Lautgesetze, Uppsala: Universitets Årskrift 1941 (Child Language, Aphasia and Phonological Universals, trans. Allan R. Keiler, The Hague: Mouton 1968).

46 Roman Jakobson, Child Language, Aphasia and Phonological Universals, The Hague: Mouton 1968: 21.

47 Ibid.: 24.48 Ibid.: 25.49 Merleau-Ponty, Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, Evanston:

Northwestern UP, 1991: 24.50 Merleau-Ponty, Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, Evanston:

Northwestern UP, 1991: 23.51 Merleau-Ponty, Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, Evanston:

Northwestern UP, 1991: 23.52 Daniel Heller-Roazen, Echolalias. On the Forgetting of Languages, Berkeley: Zone

Books 2005. 53 Ibid.: 11.54 Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the invisible: 175.