<Articles>Subject, Language and Body : Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology in Educational Studies

Abstract

Focusing on the body and language, this paper clarifies the concept of 'subject' from the perspective of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty, in response to Saussure's initial insight, claimed that the subject is not given before speaking and that the meaning of the word arises not through concepts that pre-exist language but through language as a system of differences. According to Merleau-Ponty, there is no meaning before a speaker begins to speak; a 'silence' exists before speech. Meaning emerges from a paradoxical relationship between existing and not-yet-expressed meaning, through the expressive field situated between speakers, signs, prior language use, and current speech, that is, through expression. Merleau-Ponty claimed that expression is not the intellectual activity of disembodied minds or consciousnesses but, rather, that the body is the medium of expression. Merleau-Ponty's insight reveals that the body itself has an expressive function that offers ways to comprehend the meaning of a word which suggests that the subject himself or herself is born from the experience of speaking This dynamic process of the subject emerging will be a trigger for activation if we are sensitive enough to keep it tacit in the educational setting.