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21 " I create Stendhal; I am Stendhal while reading him. But that is because first he knew how to bring me to dwell within him. The reader's sovereignty is only imaginary, since he draws all his force from that infernal machine called the book, the apparatus for making significations. The relations between the reader and the book are like those loves in which one partner initially dominates because he was more proud or more temperamental, and then the situation changes and the other, more wise and more silent, rules. The expressive moment occurs where the relationship reverses itself, where the book takes possession of the reader. "
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , The Prose of the World
22 " Philosophy is not the passage from a confused world to a universe of closed significations. On the contrary, philosophy begins with the awareness of a world which consumes and destroys our established significations but also renews and purifies them. "
23 " Rather than imprisoning it, language is like a magic machine for transporting the 'I' into the other person's perspective. "
24 " When I am listening, it is not necessary that I have an auditory perception of the articulated sounds but that the conversation pronounces itself within me. It summons me and grips me; it envelops and inhabits me to the point that I cannot tell what comes from me and what from it. Whether speaking or listening, I project myself into the other person, I introduce him into my own self. "
25 " Meaning is like spots of light surrounded by rugged clouds of night, glowing islands. "
26 " 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. "
27 " There are eyes at the tips of my fingers. "