The Prose of the World

The work that Maurice Merleau-Ponty planned to call The Prose of the World, or Introduction to the Prose of the World, was unfinished at the time of his death. The book was to constitute the first section of a two-part work whose aim was to offer, as an extension of his Phenomenology of Perception, a theory of truth. This edition's editor, Claude Lefort, has interpreted and transcribed the surviving typescript, reproducing Merleau-Ponty's own notes and adding documentation and commentary.

Table of Contents. Editor's Preface. Editorial Note. Translator's Introduction: Language and the Voice of Philosophy. 1. The Specter of a Pure Language. 2. Science and the Experience of Expressionism. 3. The Indirect Language. 4. The Algorithm and the Mystery of Language. 5. Dialogue and the Perception of the Other. 6. Expression and the Child's Drawing. Index.