and Johnson, who take their distance from phenomenology, in that they employ
a concept of the unconscious, which is nevertheless closer to Leibniz’s ‘minute
perceptions’ than the Freudian unconscious. The phenomenological body is
at once conscious of itself and active. It orients itself in the world that surrounds
it, its Umweltwhich is also a Lebenswelt. Lakoff and Johnson thus describe a
type of metaphor that they call ‘metaphors of orientation’. The ball is behind
the rock not because the rock has a front and a back, like a car, but because
it is situated between the ball and my body: if I walk around it, this ‘behind’
becomes an ‘in front’. And it is involved in the elaboration of systems of
metaphors (characterised as ‘structural’ by Lakoff and Johnson), which interpret
what is new on the basis of what is known – that is, starting from the concrete
of perception.^2 As for the third kind of metaphor – ‘ontological’ metaphors
(i.e. abstractions such as ‘inflation’ or ‘revolution’) – it embodies language’s
tendency to fetishism (which, as we have seen, is both necessary and
deleterious), to the transformation of processes (e.g. inflation) into things. But
this abstraction is grounded in the body, which is its necessary starting-point.
Thus, according to Lakoff and Johnson, our conception of the world is
constructed on the basis of metaphors of the situation of our body in space,
which yields, for example, the Metaphor of Temporal Orientation: the
localisation of the body of the observer is linked to the present, the space
situated in front of the observer to the future, and so on.^3
This kind of analysis rapidly reaches its limits (and we remember the
ferocious critique to which Bergson subjected metaphorical thinking about
time in terms of space). To realise that the conception of time set out here is
rather simplistic, it is enough to consider the elaboration of notion of aspect
in Benveniste or Culioli. But this view of an embodied speaker, in which the
object of analysis is not the utterance as result but the process of enunciation,
has the signal merit of saving us from physicalist reductionism or Chomskyan
naturalism. To revert from Chomsky to Merleau-Ponty (and his dichotomy
between the speaking word and the spoken word)^4 is insufficient, but it helps
us to advance. The phenomenological body is more relevant for our analysis
than the ‘natural’, purely biological body which, in linguistic matters, always
Propositions (II) • 177(^2) See Lakoff and Johnson 1980.
(^3) See Lakoff and Johnson 1999, pp. 140–3.
(^4) See Merleau-Ponty 1973 and 1968.