Last Lectures

Benveniste's lectures had a shaping influence on a generation of scholars that includes Barthes, Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva and Todorov. Here, for the first time, these lectures are made available in English for a new generation of linguists and philosophers of language. This book includes the full course of fifteen lectures that Benveniste gave in the Collège de France on the Rue des Écoles in Paris between December 1968 and December 1969. Benveniste's work as offered here presents the first serious attempt at reconciling the sign theories of Saussure and Peirce and draws together, language, writing and society into a comprehensive theory of signifying. Benveniste's philosophy of language considers key concepts such as utterance, enunciation, speaker, discourse and subjectivity and, as such, is central to the areas of discourse analysis, text linguistics, pragmatics, semantics, conversational analysis, stylistics and semiotics. Key Features: Introduction from editors Jean-Claude Coquet and Irène Fenoglio New introduction by the translator John Joseph Preface by Julia Kristeva Includes Benveniste's course of fifteen lectures Émile Benveniste (1902-1976) was the pre-eminent linguist in France for three decades beginning in the late 1930s. He worked mainly on Indo-European historical linguistics, but became widely known as a theoretician through the two volumes of his Problems in General Linguistics (1966, 1974) and Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society (1969). This book contains the final lectures he gave before a stroke in December 1969 paralysed and silenced him.