SOURCE: Coyne, Margaret Urban. “Merleau-Ponty on Language: An Interrupted Journey toward a Phenomenology of Speaking.” International Philosophical Quarterly 20, no. 3 (September 1980): 307-26.

In the following essay, Coyne discusses Merleau-Ponty's attempts to create a “gestural” theory of linguistics.

At Merleau-Ponty's untimely death in 1961, his published works reflected a growing preoccupation with language and meaning as a central problem of philosophy. Indeed, his ambitious attempt to recapture the peculiar significance of the act of speech and the status of language as a unique cultural instrument seems to become the main focus of his larger project, the reconstruction of western philosophical thought on a truly phenomenological foundation. Perhaps it is no exaggeration to say that the problem of the ground and power of language had eventually become coincident for him with the problem of philosophy itself; for in the final and posthumously published work, The Visible and the Invisible, we find the...