Un io che è un altro: corpo, linguaggio e istituzione di senso in Merleau-Ponty

«There Is a Myself Which Is Other»: Body, Language and the Institution of Meaning in Merleau-Ponty The aim of this contribution is to illustrate the embodied vision of language put forward by Merleau-Ponty in The Prose of the World (1969), with particular attention to the so-called encroachment between lived body and other’s body and the link between the concept of institution and the problem of intersubjectivity. The intersection of phenomenology with Saussure’s reading and gestalt psychology leads Merleau-Ponty to assign a strategic role to an open conception of the notion of the ’field of experience’ through which to rethink the interpenetration and trespassing of embodied subjects in a dynamic manner: the system of self-other is a body-to-body between two beings endowed with body and language, each of which attracts the other through invisible threads that create a «common situation» in which the dynamic sedimentation of history is grafted.