" The study that I made of the whirlwind of language, of the other as a force drawing me toward a meaning, applies in the first place to the whirlwind of the other drawing me toward himself. It is not simply that I am fixed by the other, that he is the X by whom I am seen, frozen. He is the person spoken to, i.e., an offshoot of myself, outside, my double, my twin, because I make him do everything that I do and he makes me do the same. It is true that language is founded, as Sartre says, but not on an apperception; it is founded on the phenomenon of the mirror, ego-alter ego, or of the echo, in other words, of a carnal generality: what warms me, warms him; it is founded on the magical action of like upon like (the warm sun makes me warm), on the fusion of me embodied—and the world. This foundation does not prevent language from coming back dialectically over what preceded it and transforming the purely carnal and vital coexistence with the world and bodies into a coexistence of language. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , The Prose of the World