The Sensible World and the World of Expression Quotes

“Perception...is not the confrontation of an ob-ject. The ob-ject only speaks to me laterally, i.e., it doesn't affect me frontally, but from the side by awakening complicity in me, its presence is obsessive because it is exogenous and endogenous. I.e., it "solicits me" (Valéry)...due to a kind of postural impregnation whereby I crystallized an entire order of nascent significations on this twig.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Sensible World and the World of Expression: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953

“The body schema is a power to vary a certain principle without explicit knowledge of this principle...This playing with a principle that's not possessed is consciousness itself. Consciousness is, if you like, synonymous with imperception. Consciousness of a figure is consciousness without knowledge of a background.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Sensible World and the World of Expression: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953

“The body schema is not perceived--It is the norm or privileged position in contrast to which the perceived body is defined. It is prior to explicit perception.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Sensible World and the World of Expression: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953

“Just as the speaking subject only understands and speaks as a possessor of a system of gesticulation defined by dimensions of variation, the subject that perceives movement can only do so inasmuch as he possesses the equivalences of a sort of natural language: that's what sensory fields are, given diacritical systems with use values and characteristic equivalences. But between these fields there are also equivalences, like a common language of these dialects.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Sensible World and the World of Expression: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953

“The mask is defined by what it masks (heterosexuality by homosexuality, -- religion by oppression), precisely to be able to mask it. Hence a structural inversion that implies the presence of the true in the false (and of the false in the true). There is therefore no remedy which would consist in destroying appearance in order to reveal reality...One can destroy only by realizing....Hence truth is not behind ideologies but in their internal movement of realization and destruction.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Sensible World and the World of Expression: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953

“Inasmuch as there is figure, there is also inarticulate background, inasmuch as we have being (figure), we don't have it, and inasmuch as we don't have it (background), inasmuch as we let it be without thinking about it, that's when we have it.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Sensible World and the World of Expression: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953

“Vertical and horizontal are not grasped for themselves but in the divergence of things from them. Thus as levels. Perception of them is imperception: it's when they're destroyed that we feel them, when they function they're what we take for granted. Therefore perceptual sense = divergence with respect to a level that is not thematic. Therefore meaning here is not essence.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Sensible World and the World of Expression: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953

“Deepen the notion of gnosia through that of praxia. It's a matter of grasping mind in its nascent state.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Sensible World and the World of Expression: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953

“Individuals with apraxia show us through its absence an activity that is present in everyone, albeit scarcely visible, that constructs 'virtual space,' a system of correspondences between properties of my actual field and what these properties would be for me situated elsewhere or for another.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Sensible World and the World of Expression: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953

“Gestalt theory: the simplest formation is a figure on a background. This means: the very positing of the figure as in-itself, as something determinate, always presupposes the simultaneous presence of a background. The background forms part of the definition of the being (without it there is no figure, no outlines).

Consequently there is always something inarticulate and implicit in that of which there is consciousness...

Perception and imperception...the fact that one is conscious of this means that there is also that which is unspoken.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Sensible World and the World of Expression: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953

“The adoption of a level presupposes the expressive relation between the perceived and ourselves, presupposes our settling into it, that is to say, the raising of certain of its elements to the status of dimensions...The sensible thing speaks a certain language to us which we understand just as if a linguistic agreement were established between our perceptual system and it, as if we spoke its language without having learned it = expression.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Sensible World and the World of Expression: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953

“Perceptual consciousness is not the positing of a statement, it is tacit, it does not concern free-floating significations that exist for themselves as such: but rather significations like those in a painting: a touch of green here makes a cheek smile without us knowing how, in virtue of a syntax that we practice without having an explicit understanding of it. The perceived world is full of magical regions that assigns unforeseen properties to the beings that enter them because they are the habitat of an affective category...Hence bound, non-speaking significations, or structures.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Sensible World and the World of Expression: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953

“What's a level? It's a typical activity, it's the universal context of an action in the world. Perceptual consciousness often consists in noticing divergence in relation to a level, and this divergence is the sense which is thus configuration or structure. This sense is less possessed than it is practiced: perhaps it can't be defined, but every aberrant fact is lived as deviation in relation to it. Thus perception adjusts imperfect circles, goes toward good forms.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Sensible World and the World of Expression: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953