Review of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le problème de la parole: Cours au Collège de France, Notes, 1953–1954

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.