Abstract

Merleau-Ponty’s reflection on a carnal ontology, by bringing to light the ambiguity inherent in the relation between the visible and the invisible, ultimately unfolds into a “semantic ontology”1: there is, in fact, a being of language in which the enigma of being is repeated, because beyond the movement of the pure significations there remains the silent mass of the discourse, that which is not of the order of the sayable, and because the greatest merit of expression is to disclose this continuous passage from the word to being and from being to the word, or this double openness of the one upon the other. To think through this exchange is no doubt what The Visible and the Invisible was to devote itself to […] there is no frontier between language and the world.2.