Our article is about the importance of the body notion in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. Present in communication, the body incarnates the possibility of understanding gestures and words, stressing the bodily character of significance, the apprehension of which lies in the reciprocity of behaviors experienced in the social dimension. We also develop the concept of spoken language; according to Merleau-Ponty, the sense of language was expropriated of the word by the empiricist and idealist conceptions, based in Cartesianism. Merleau-Ponty observes an immanence of the sense in the word, pointing that the understanding of the language refers to the analysis of the original expressive gesture. The founder character of language is shown in the ambiguous relationships between speech and thinking, meaning and word, significance and significant. This ambiguity, present in all forms of language constitutes the very nature of the expression.
merleau-ponty; body; language; speech; expression