IRACY FERREIRA DOS SANTOS JUNIOR

This project investigates the status that modern literature occupies in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. For that, it demonstrates how, in his first courses, Merleau-Ponty’s contact with the modern literature of Proust fosters the study of creative word, capable of expressing the sensible and assuming an ontological dimension, as well as instituting new symbolic matrices for the notion of truth and for intersubjective relations. This first period inaugurates the path that will be deepened by Merleau-Ponty in his last writings, to unravel an ontology of modern literature, which finds in metaphor, in its convergence with poetics, the unfolding of an expressive power of language. Finally, it argues that modern literature in Merleau-Ponty is indispensable for the construction of his new ontology.