385 Martina ferrari POIETIC TRANSSPATIALITY MERLEAU-PONTY, NORMATIVITY, AND THE LATENT SENS OF NATURE In the Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty tells the readers that the task of philosophy is to draw “the things themselves […] from the depths of their silence” into expression, to “plunge into the world […] [to] make it say, fnally, what in its silence it means to say” (4, 39). These remarks suggest two considerations. First, they indicate that, for Merleau-Ponty, the world, things, and nature, in sum, the sensible, have a sense that, albeit silent or latent, is irreducible to anthropomorphic projections. Second, they suggest that the task of philosophy is to express this latent sense in such a way that the world “speaks” for itself. As the ample literature on the paradox of expression indicates, these two considerations are intimately linked: they yield the seemingly paradoxical task of expressing a latent sense of the sensible that eludes conceptual transparency or positivity (VI 214). That is, the recognition that there is a sense of the sensible (frst consideration) calls for expressive modes that are suited to “giving voice” to phenomena that make sense silently—modes that do not model sense on our conceptual posits (second consideration). Because of space and time constraints, in this article, I focus on the frst consideration, i.e., on the latent sense of the sensible, and spell out the ontological processes that yield this sense. In the frst and second sections, I trace, in his later thinking, Merleau-Ponty’s shift toward ontology marked by an investigation of the “being of the relation [of spatio-temporal individuals]” (Barbaras 2010, 382) and thematized as fesh—a spatializing and temporalizing that generates meaningful differences. I suggest that this conceptual shift is fecund for questions of the onto-logy of nature as it introduces a non-dualist or substantial conception of nature that makes visible, in its latency, the sense of the sensible—a sense that is neither “all naked” nor inaccessible, hidden behind “a human mask,” and that dualist accounts and propositional theories of meaning make invisible (VI 131, 136). 1 Merleau-Ponty’s remarks in the opening lines of Nature capture these insights: “nature,” he tells us, “is what has meaning, without this meaning being posited by thought: it is the autoproduction of meaning,” which is to say that nature has “an interior, is determined from within” (N 3). By explicitly attending to Nature and taking natural processes as the focus of my inquiry into the sense of the sensible, in the third section, I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s onto-logy of nature suggests that there is a sens [meaning