“
Like the flesh of the visible, speech is a total part of the significations, like it, speech is a relation to Being through a being, and, like it, it is narcissistic, eroticized, endowed with a natural magic that attracts the other significations into its web, as the body feels the world in feeling itself. In reality, there is much more than a parallel or an analogy here, there is solidarity and intertwining...No longer are there essences above us, like positive objects, offered to a spiritual eye; but there is an essence
beneath us, a common nervure of the signifying and the signified, adherence in and reversibility of one another—as the visible things are the secret folds of our flesh, and yet our body is one of the visible things. As the world is behind my body, the operative
essence is behind the operative speech also, the speech that possesses the signification less than it is possessed by it, that does not speak of it, but speaks it, or speaks according to it, or lets it speak and be spoken within me, breaks through my present. If there is an ideality, a thought that has a future in me, that even breaks through my space of consciousness and has a future with the others, and finally, having become a writing, has a future in every possible reader, this can be only that thought that leaves me with my hunger and leaves them with their hunger,
that betokens a generalized buckling of my landscape and opens it to the universal, precisely because it is rather an unthought.
”
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty (The Visible and the Invisible (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy))