The title which Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) gave to his third course in the chair of philosophy of the Collège de France contains a play on words which may or may not have been intended. The lectures open with the problem which parole “speech” presents to linguistic analysis and philosophical thought, and goes on to illuminate it with, amongst other things, evidence from patients with aphasia, which he calls désintégration de la parole. Disintegration is the penultimate problem of speech, next to its absence.

More significantly, the title embodies a theoretical defiance, or at least an innovation. The Cours de linguistique générale (Saussure 1922 [1916]: 112) hierarchises the two French words corresponding to “language”, langue and langage, plus the word parole, usually translated as “speech”, such that langage is the overarching term for the human language faculty; a langue is a particular language system such as English or French, as shared by a community of speakers; and parole the speech produced by individual speakers using the langue. Merleau-Ponty, steeped as his was in both perceptual psychology and phenomenology, wanted to know how langue is shaped and re-shaped by parole, and saw that to represent parole simply as the product of langue is a distortion.

Knowing of Saussure’s struggles with the terms over the courses in general linguistics which he gave at the Université de Genève starting in 1907, and from his manuscript notes, it is unlikely that he himself was satisfied with this definition which he provided for his students in the third and final course (1910-11). In order to put parole in what he considered its proper predominant place, Merleau-Ponty made it his umbrella term, encompassing not just parole in Saussure’s sense but also langage and langue. In our more familiar Saussurean terms, the English-language title of this book would refer to the problem, not just of speech, but of language in all its dimensions.

Merleau-Ponty left a series of planning notes for the course as a whole and for individual lectures. The manuscripts can be read at the Site Richelieu of the Bibliothèque de France,¹ although with considerable difficulty: compared to him, Saussure was a model of good penmanship. The editors have done an excellent job of organising the volume from these manuscripts, transcribing what is often scribbling (but fluent scribbling, so that the editorial issues posed by Saussure’s incessant changes and additions arise rarely), annotating it judiciously, and contextualising it within the trajectory of Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Until any notes taken by those present at the lectures might be found and collated into an equivalent of the Cours, this edition is unlikely to be superseded.

We can see from the start of the notes for the opening lecture (3 Dec. 1953) how it is aimed at rethinking the langue-parole relationship:

INTRODUCTION – LE PROBLÈME

Parole, non langage –

Distinction parole-langue (Saussure) :

langue : institution, système de conventions

parole : réalisations particulières par les sujets parlants.

nous voulons dire que la parole n’est pas simple effet dérivé, suppose la langue, mais la produit et reproduit – langue non définissable sans elle. (pp. 39-40)²

Merleau-Ponty believes this reversal is implicit in the Cours, when it says that everything that is diachronic in the langue is only so through parole:³

Donc S[aussure] tend à une intégration langue-parole, avec rapport complexe. Ceci donne définitivement à la parole rôle essentiel dans la langue : initialement parole = fait, système = langue. Maintenant langue = somme de faits, diachronie, parole = synchronie, système. (p. 63)⁴

Giving primacy to parole is a hugely important point which most of those commenting on Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Saussure have failed to grasp, judging his reading instead as ill-informed or, at best, idiosyncratic (see Foultier 2013 for a useful collection and rebuttal of such comments). Merleau-Ponty was concerned with the point’s importance for the two principal concerns of his psychological-philosophical phenomenology: perception and expression, each inextricably linked to the other. Parole, in his broad sense, is the link. It is evident that he read the Cours closely, along with Bally (1913), Vendryes (1921) and Benveniste (1951), even if, as the editors insinuate (p. 45n.), his references to Meillet were prompted by Fourquet (1950).

The editors say that Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Saussure “seems to date from the end of the 1940s” (p. 39n.), citing the absence of any reference to the Cours in his pre-war work. They catalogue all the numerous references from 1947 to 1953, including a course entitled “Saussure” which he reputedly gave at the École Normale Supérieure in 1946 (Silverman 1980: 124). The editors are clearly dubious about this, saying that he “perhaps” gave the course, and not in 1946 but in 1948-9 (p. 39n.). They might have noted that his awareness of and engagement with Saussure came no later than 1935, when he revised a lengthy review article by the phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch, in which the Cours is discussed (Gurwitsch 1935: 419, 429), and perhaps earlier. In 1930 his sister Monique Merleau-Ponty, to whom he was close, married the linguist Robert-Léon Wagner, a disciple of Gustave Guillaume, who, as Meillet’s student, had imbibed Saussure at the slimmest of removes.

In the lectures of 10 Dec. 1953 and 7 Jan. 1954 the Cours is the central subject. This is still the “Introduction” to Merleau-Ponty’s lectures; only on 28 Jan. does Part 1, La parole en action, commence (p. 92). After his critical reading of the langue-parole distinction, he notes (p. 60) that Saussure makes corrections to it elsewhere, citing the Cours on the psychological nature of langue, and how it cannot be separated from speakers (Saussure 1922 [1916]: 22, 19n.). His reading of the Cours is remarkable for lighting on everything that contrasts with the structuralist (semi-) (mis-) understandings of it (on which see Joseph 2018 & forthcoming), including a flottement “wavering” over parole which he ascribes to the unsustainably sharp dichotomy between synchrony and diachrony:

Il y a du systématique dans la succession et du fortuit dans le système. – Ce qui empêche S[aussure] d’intégrer, c’est que pour lui l’intégration serait passage au panchronique i. e. sacrifierait contingence à intériorite, rendrait la langue homogène, poserait un « tout du langage », parole et langue confondues, et que ce tout est pour lui « inconnaissable, parce qu’il n’est pas homogène ». Donc S[aussure] veut maintenir les 2 perspectives objectiviste [sic] – faits opaques – contingence et systématique – pour le sujet parlant – loi interne. Mais l’intégration ne serait pas réduction à l’unité. Ce serait justement reconnaissance du rapport d’interdépendance parole-langue, analyse du sujet en situation dans langue. (p. 63)⁵

Whether one agrees or disagrees, this is no ill-informed critique. Nor is it the only wincingly well-aimed arrow: Merleau-Ponty is quite right to pull Saussure up for not specifying what he means by terms such as psychique or conscience collective (p. 64), which are vague enough to invite a range of interpretations. He includes arbitraire in this critique, and on that the Cours does make an effort to forestall misunderstandings; but the failure of the effort is evident, given the debates over the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign which structural linguists engaged in, particularly in the aftermath of Benveniste (1939).

At the same time as he gives primacy to parole as the umbrella term, Merleau-Ponty also insists on the need for psychologists and philosophers to focus on parole in Saussure’s specific sense – but directed to the speaker rather than the text produced. He is in effect echoing the concept of énonciation, today associated particularly with Benveniste (1970) and linguists who took up his lead, but which actually developed in the work of several people from the late 1940s onward, including notably Jakobson (1950), Lacan (2013 [1958]) and Dubois (1969). Structural linguists, with few exceptions, were all too prone to the allures of the ivory tower, where they could escape the infinite vagaries that parole is heir to, and indulge in the idealisation of a pseudo-natural system, licensed by their reading of Saussure’s langue. This Merleau-Ponty found disappointing, to put it mildly. It would not illuminate the questions which drove him. But he had the perspicacity to sense that Saussure would have been no less satisfied with such an idealisation. His attention to Saussure was due less to the status of the Cours, which did not attain recognition beyond linguistics until the second half of the 1950s, than to Merleau-Ponty’s recognition of a kindred seeker, who, naturally, never reached the object of his quest.

I have focussed on Saussure for obvious reasons, given the journal in which this review appears. But Part 1 of the course of lectures includes much else, including animadversions on Humboldt and innere Sprachform and, most originally, on the autobiography of Helen Keller, whom every American child of my generation knew as a prodigy, born blind and presumed incapable of language, and yet who not only acquired it but became a significant intellectual and cultural figure. Part 2 is focussed on Proust, which is rather startling until one sees that Proust’s writing is the ultimate exemplar of parole that is also énonciation, containing within it its producer, with all his hypersensitivity to the context surrounding him.

The conclusion of the course sees Merleau-Ponty return to Saussure in the light of la parole créatrice, “creative parole”, as manifested in the language of Proust, that most self-conscious, interior-oriented of writers.

[…] Exercice de la parole chez l’écrivain qui est : la structure de son paysage mental devenant principe organisateur d’un système diacritique qui le communique.

C’était vérifier l’idée de Saussure que l’acte de parler = articuler des signes les uns sur les autres pour rendre des différences de signification, ce qui veut dire que la signification n’est pas un contenu possédé, mais un certain vide déterminé ou écart, et que l’expression qu’on en donne, écart aussi entre les signes, n’est pas avec elle dans un rapport direct, mais toujours oblique, que la signification transparaît dans la parole, et, au-delà de chaque signe, est pourtant adhérente à la parole. (p. 200)⁶

Merleau-Ponty wonders how best to characterise both what creative parole creates, and the process of this creation.

Qu’est-ce qui se dépose ? Comment, à partir de nos descriptions peut-il y avoir 1) un ordre de significations prosaïques, atteintes sans effort, atteintes par tous. Résultent-elles d’une opération expressive comme celle de l’art ? (p. 200-201)⁷

For phenomenology, language is the lens which crucially determines what is perceived, and how. His attempts at grasping it led him to believe in the possibility of a “convergence” of Husserl and Saussure (as Andén discusses in her preface, p. 21). Language occupied Merleau-Ponty’s thinking from the late 1940s to the mid 1950s, then became less prominent. Whether this was because he thought he had achieved what was needed, or concluded that it was unachievable, or mattered less than he had imagined, is unclear.

When considering the heritage of Saussurean thought we naturally look to the structural linguistics and semiotics of the mid-20th century and the generalised structuralism to which they gave rise. When we see that arguably the most important French philosopher of that period was reading the Cours in a way unlike that of linguists whose training continued a direct line of succession from Saussure, our instinct is to be dubious about his understanding of it. Le problème de la parole suffices to challenge that dubiety, and make us ask whether Merleau-Ponty, coming at the Cours from an oblique direction, may not have been amongst its best, most perceptive readers, whose insights into it still have the potential to open new avenues of research, within linguistics and semiotics but also phenomenology, aesthetics, literary theory and the many other fields for which, in Merleau-Ponty’s day, linguistics was becoming the master discipline, and from which it has since been, if not banished, then kept at a distance, impoverishing both sides. Perhaps the time for a new convergence has arrived.