In Opacidad y relativismo. La situacionalidad del conocimiento en tensión entre Merleau-Ponty y Foucault, Claudio Cormick introduces Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s and Michel Foucault’s philosophies as attempts to face two possible obstacles for human knowledge : on the one hand, the opacity of consciousness with regard to the foundations of its own positions; on the other, the relative, non-absolute character of our claims to truth, inasmuch as they are formulated within concrete social and historical conditions.

This article revisits the concept of great prose originally proposed by Merleau-Ponty to stress the importance of literary language in the problem of the expression of truth. To achieve this objective, the main theses of the course given by Merleau-Ponty in the 1953-1954 academic year, titled Le problème de la parole, will be discussed. A characterization of literary language and its ability to express the meaning of perception will follow. Finally, the need to incorporate literary expression in the elaboration of (...) a philosophy of the sensible will be considered. (shrink)