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I am not in front of my body, I am in it or rather I am it… If we can still speak of interpretation in relation to the perception of one’s own body, we shall have to say that it interprets itself.

Maurice Merleau Ponty

The number and richness of man’s signifiers always surpasses the set of defined objects that could be termed signifieds. The symbolic function must always precede its object and does not encounter reality except when it precedes it into the imaginary.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Definition Function Imagination Man Object Reality Rich
It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one “to have his passion as a profession.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Fortune Greatness Passion Professional
The photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the metamorphosis of time.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Close Destroy Instant Open Photograph Time
I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Expression Facial Live Myself
It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Insane Mission Remove
I discover vision, not as a ‘thinking about seeing,’ to use Descartes expression, but as a gaze at grips with a visible world, and that is why for me there can be another’s gaze.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Discover Expression Myself Vision World
I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it. But this separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Color Consciousness Division Failure Recognition Separate Sight
The world is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Natural Perception Thinking World
The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Art Body Compare Object Work
It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Certain Essence Establishment Reservation
My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Myself Teaching Thinking Word
The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Art Existence Expression Philosophy Reflection Truth World
To understand is to experience harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance – and the body is our anchorage in the world.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Experience Goal Harmony Ourselves Understand World
Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it’s caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But, because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Circle Fabric Mobile See Visible World
To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Explanation Obscure
Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Body Breathe Form Heart Life System Visible World