ESSAY ON MERLEAU-PONTY’S PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

ABSTRACT: This article aimed at expressing the originality of Merleau-Ponty‟s philosophy of language,especially his demarcation from the traditional approaches. Despite the fact that Merleau-Ponty brought a veryinteresting contribution to philosophy of language, he did not consider language to be central in his philosophy.In order to situate him in the context of philosophy of language, I started by preliminary notions; this introducedto his philosophy of language and made it clearer. Merleau-Ponty brought a new way of looking at the triadbeing-thought-language; for him, these three elements are simultaneous. In addition, I showed that speech doesnot reveal reality as it really is because language is existential and because it speaks about a mystery.

KEYWORDS: Being, language, meaning, speech, thought.