The Origins of Law and Its Essential Strucures

We have now traversed, across the Introduction and the first four chapters of this work, the main features of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the social world as they are expressed in the cultural mediation of nature, intersubjectivity, history and the origin of meaning, ethics, and politics. Running through all these themes and connecting them at various junctures is the notion of language analysed according to de Saussure’s distinctions of la langue and la parole, on the one hand, and the synchronic and the diachronic, on the other. Following the interplay of these perspectives on language, we have seen how Merleau-Ponty finds them illuminative of the bonds of intersubjective communication, creative expression in the origin and change of meaning, the nature of history (at least up to a point), and politics.