Ontology, metaphor and modern literature in Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

This project intends to investigate the status and function that modern literature has in Merleau-Ponty's philosophical work. Literature that reveals itself as spontaneity, the indirect mode of meaning, which preserves the ambiguity and fecundity of a continuous exercise of creation and discovery of the sensible itself. For that, it will be demonstrated how, in the first four courses at the Collège de France (RULL, MSME, Pbp, IP), Merleau-Ponty's contact with the modern literature of Proust and other writers fosters the study of creative word, capable of expressing the sensible and assuming an ontological dimension, as well as from sedimenting the meaning of history and culture and instituting new symbolic matrices for the notion of truth and for intersubjective relations. It is hoped to state that this first period inaugurates the path that will be deepened by Merleau-Ponty in the writings Le Visible et l'Invisible and Notes de Cours, in an attempt to unravel an ontology of modern literature, which he finds in metaphor, in its convergence with poetics, the unfolding of an expressive power of language, and its task to unveil the chiasm between the visible and the invisible, between the writer and the sensible and the reversibility between silence and language. Finally, it is intended to defend that the protagonism of modern literature in Merleau-Ponty's thoughts reaffirms and supports the hypothesis that it is indispensable for the construction of his new ontology. (AU)