"To speak is not to put a word under each thought; if it were, nothing would ever be said. We would not have the feeling of living the language and we would remain silent, because the sign would be immediately obliterated by its own meaning and because thought would never encounter anything by thought - the thought it wanted to expressa dnthe thought which it would form from a wholly explicit language. We sometimes have, on the contrary, the feeling that a thought has been said - not replaced by verbal counter but incorparated in words and made available in them. And finally, there is a power of words because, working against one another, they are attracted at a distance by thought like tides by the mood, and because they evoke their meaning in this tumult much more imperiously than if each one of them brought back only a listless signification of which it was the indifferent and predestined sign." pg. 81
Indirect Language and the Voice of Silence, by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Johnson, Galen A. Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (Spep). Northwestern University Press, 1994.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Here, Merleau-Ponty describes the tyranny of language - an interesting, and major, domination of forced categorization over abstract definitions. This mode of domination is also visible in other forms of categorical representations, such as symbols, generalization of colors, etc.
Post a Comment