The aim of the paper will consist in confronting two disciplines that—despite indirect interactions here and there—have rarely responded to one another: phenomenology and gesture studies. In the first part of the paper, I will concentrate on Merleau-Ponty’s famous chapter on language in Phenomenology of Perception. It is well known that Merleau-Ponty refers to the phenomenon of gesture in order to refute what he calls the intellectualist conception of language, that is, the view of language as an instrument that we use to convey the ideas “contained” in our mind. According to Merleau-Ponty, the meaning is rather directly expressed by language in the same way as it is visibly expressed by gesture (a gesture of anger, for example): this amounts to saying that rather than gesture having a language-like nature (which, of course, may often be the case), there is something profoundly gesture-like about language. I will argue, however, that Merleau-Ponty’s view of gesture contains, at least implicitly, a remarkable reflection on the relationship that the embodied subject entertains with the world: human gestures, in their various forms, are in fact a way of relating to the world. This relationship is twofold: on the one hand, our gestures are shaped and determined by the structure of our Umwelt, but on the other, they are also employed to structure and to “appropriate” that Umwelt itself.
The second part of the paper will present several case studies of this dual relationship, drawing on the work of Adam Kendon and Jürgen Streeck, leading scholars in the realm of gesture studies. The aim will be to show that Merleau-Ponty’s rather “abstract” philosophy of gesture may, in fact, represent a useful tool for the empirical study of human gestures themselves.