How can the emergence of meaning be grasped phenomenologically as an engagement with the world that argues for the kinship between imaginal consciousness and textual experience? This question will ultimately take us from questions of poetics, as explored by Jacques Derrida and Theodor Adorno, to the Husserlian meditations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s later years. The poetics of Paul Valéry provides both Derrida and Adorno with resources to demonstrate how the discipline of reading produces a material remainder that offers a clue to a phenomenology of meaning. Hence, in Derrida’s case, Valéry suggests the limit to our capacity to grasp the origin of meaning in conceptual terms, whereas for Adorno, Valéry opens up a utopian horizon that also marks the limit of what can be imagined as futural. However, Merleau-Ponty shows how, in Edmund Husserl’s late study, “The Origin of Geometry,” the theme of materiality suggests the notions of textuality and imaginal awareness as developed in later phenomenology. The conclusion of this paper suggests how Merleau-Ponty’s late work enables us to interpret the play between text and image as the sphere in which poetic experience can be linked to meaning as a phenomenological occurrence.