Emile Benveniste PDF

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
POSTMODERN ISM
Edited by
Victor E. Taylor
and Charles E. Winquist
London and New York

First published 2001
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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© 2001 Routledge
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library qf Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Encyclopedia of Postmodernism I Edited by Victor E. Taylor and
Charles E. Winquist.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Postmodernism - encyclopedias.
I. Winquist, Charles E., 1944- II. Taylor, Victor E.
B831.2 .E63 2000
149'.97'03-dc21 00-028239
ISBN 0--415-15294-1
Benveniste, Emile 35
- - (1978) "Critique of Violence," Reflections, ed. historicism) and foreground the difficult question of
Peter Demetz, trans. EdmundJephcott, New York: "physei or thesez?" (natural law or conventional law),
Schocken, 277-300. an allusion reflecting Benveniste's debt to Stoic
- - (1996) Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926, thought on the relationship between things and
ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W Jennings, names. The Stoic thesis (meaning both "arbitrary
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. determination" and "position") echoes throughout
Benveniste's work, especially his influential studies
on "enunciation."
Benveniste, Emile Benveniste's interest in enunciation begins in the
1950s, during his association with Jacques Lacan.
b. 25 May 1902, Aleppo, Syria; d. 3 "Remarques sur la fonction du langage dans la
October 1976, Paris, France decouverte freudienne" (1956) posits psychoanaly-
Linguist sis as a model of the interlocutory structure of
speech events and defines this structure as a
Although the 1966 Johns Hopkins symposium on
dialectical relationship of speaker /hearer, "posi-
structuralism is remembered for Jacques Der-
tioning" the speaking subject (thesis): "the subject
rida's critique of the structuralist dream of unifYing
makes use of the act of speech and discourse in
the human sciences, participants acknowledged
order to 'represent' himself' to himself as he wishes
another student of language, a linguist who had
to see himself and as he calls upon the 'other' to
specified, since the 1930s, the shortcomings of a
observe him" (1971: 67). "De la subjectivite dans le
general linguistics grounded in Saussure's theory
langage" (1958) focuses on linguistic resources that
of the sign. This linguist was Emile Benveniste,
determine subjectivity: "It is in and through
professor at the College de France specializing in
language that man constitutes himself as a
comparative studies of Indo-European grammars.
subject ... " (1971: 224). This process of enuncia-
Against Saussure's privileging of la langue, Benve-
tion operates through pronouns designating the
niste's articles advocated a linguistics of the speech
interlocutors ("I" and "you") and their spatia-
event (la parole). Republished in 1966 as Problemes de
temporal context (demonstrative and relative
linguistique generale (translated as Problems in General
Linguistics in 1971 ), these studies catalyzed ideas that pronouns, verb tenses). "Les relations de temps
would become known as poststructuralism, dans le verbe fran<;:ais" (1959) introduces a
particularly the "textual" theory of subjectivity rudimentary typology of discourse based on
elucidated by the Tel Quel group of the late 1960s degrees of enunciative features. Armed with
(Roland Barthes, Derrida, Jean-Joseph Goux, Benveniste's studies, Barthes proclaimed at the
Julia Kristeva, and Philippe Sollers). Hopkins symposium that "the writer [is] no longer
With his 1939 publication, "Nature du signe one who writes something, but one who writes -
linguistique," Benveniste established a controver- absolutely" (1986: 18).
sial presence among Saussure's disciples, arguing
that a semiology based on the arbitrary relation of References
signified/ signifier diverts attention from the core
semantic relationship of sign and reality: "To Barthes, Roland (1986) "To Write: An Intransitive
decide that the linguistic sign is arbitrary ... is Verb?," in The Rustle if Language, trans. Richard
equivalent to saying that the notion of mourning is Howard, New York: Hill-Farrar.
arbitrary because in Europe it is symbolized by Benveniste, Emile (1971) Problems in General Linguis-
black, in China by white" (19 71 : 44). The analogy tics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek, Coral Gables,
reveals Benveniste's interest in the act of speech as FL: University of Miami Press.
locus of linguistic meaning. As primary object of
study, la parole would advance linguistics beyond JAMES COMAS
Saussure's conventionalism (which Benveniste re-
garded as a complacency of nineteenth-century

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