Abstract

The article presents Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of speech. Its main focus is the experience of the vocal dimension of speech as bringing out the existential, intersubjective and transcendent meaning of speech. In confrontation with Derrida, who argues that the experience of voice founds the metaphysics of presence and thereby makes it phonologocentric, Merleau-Ponty’s view of speech and voice appears as overcoming the metaphysics of presence