Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969 9781474439923

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Last Lectures

Last Lectures Collège de France 1968 and 1969

Émile Benveniste Edited by Jean-Claude Coquet and Irène Fenoglio Translated by John E. Joseph

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com Originally published as Dernières leçons, Collège de France 1968 et 1969, © Émile Benveniste, 1968, 1969, © Seuil/Gallimard, 2012 © Editorial matter and organisation, Jean-Claude Coquet and Irène Fenoglio, 2012 © Preface, Julia Kristeva, 2012 © English translation, John E. Joseph, 2019 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 3990 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 3992 3 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 3991 6 (paperback) ISBN 978 1 4744 3993 0 (epub) The right of Émile Benveniste to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Biographical Informationvi Editors’ Acknowledgementsviii Biographical Timelineix Preface: Émile Benveniste, a Linguist Who Neither Says   Nor Hides, but Signifies Julia Kristeva Translator’s Introduction John E. Joseph Editors’ Introduction Jean-Claude Coquet and Irène Fenoglio

1 31 61

1 Semiology 2 Languages and Writing 3 Final Lecture, Final Notes

74 91 121

Annex 1: Bio-bibliography of Émile Benveniste Georges Redard Annex 2: The Émile Benveniste Papers Émilie Brunet Afterword: Émile Benveniste, a Scholar’s Fate Tzvetan Todorov

128 157 163

Name Index179 Subject Index182

v

Biographical Information

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. Julia Kristeva, author of many academic books and novels, has been a leading figure in semiotics since the 1960s. She is Professor Emeritus in the University of Paris Diderot, and in 2004 was awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize for her innovative explorations of questions on the intersection of language, culture and literature. Georges Redard (1922–2005), a specialist in the languages of Iran and Afghanistan, was professor and dean in the Universities of Neuchâtel and Berne, where he also served as rector. Tzvetan Todorov (1939–2017), a prominent figure in French literary studies, was a Director of Research in the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique and visiting professor at Yale, Harvard and other top international universities. The Académie Française awarded him the Prix Maujean (1989), the Prix La Bruyère (2001) and the Prix de la Critique (2011). Jean-Claude Coquet is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Semiotics in the Université de Paris 8. vi



Biographical Information vii

Irène Fenoglio directs the Linguistics section of the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes of the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique. John E. Joseph is Professor of Applied Linguistics in the University of Edinburgh.

Editors’ Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the exceptional welcome we received at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, first of all from Monique Cohen, the director of what was then called the Department of Oriental Manuscripts, the department which received the Benveniste bequest; then from Thierry Delcourt, who became director of the Department of Manuscripts when the various departments were unified; and from Anne-Sophie Delhaye, Adjunct Director of the Department. It was in this department that Émilie Brunet had the responsibility for this archive, and we thank her for her collaboration. The renowned linguists Jacqueline Authier-Revuz and Claudine Normand offered us their notes taken during the linguist’s last lectures in the Collège de France to supplement those taken by Jean-Claude Coquet. This precious transmission permitted us to establish a continuity in the text of the course, overcoming the discontinuity in Émile Benveniste’s own notes. Finally, this edition of Émile Benveniste’s last lectures has benefitted from the rigorous work of transcribing manuscripts carried out by Arlette Attali and Valentina Chepiga. We are indebted to them for this long and meticulous undertaking.

viii

Biographical Timeline

Émile Benveniste, 1902–1976 1902 (27 May) Birth at Aleppo (Syria, Ottoman Empire), with the name Ezra Benveniste. His father, Mathatias Benveniste (born in Smyrna in 1863), and his mother, born Maria Malkenson in Vilna (Russia, now Vilnius, Lithuania), are school inspectors of the Universal Israelite Alliance (Alliance Israélite Universelle, AIU). A brother, Henri (born Hillel Benveniste at Jaffa in 1901), deported to Auschwitz and murdered there in 1942. A sister, Carmelia (born in 1904 in Aleppo), died in 1979. 1913 Arrives in Paris to undertake his studies in the ‘little seminary’ of the Rabbinical School, 9 rue Vauquelin. Studies funded by the AIU. His parents are working in Samokov, Bulgaria. 1918 Receives baccalaureate degree, with poor results (‘mention passable’), including (according to legend) a particularly low score (1) in languages. (October) Letter from his mother to the President of the AIU asking for the whereabouts of her son, who has quit the Rabbinical School. E. B. looks for work as a teaching assistant in a lycée. Enrols in the École Pratique des Hautes Études. 1919 (21 April) His mother, Maria Benveniste, dies in Samokov, Bulgaria. E. B. had probably not seen her again since moving to Paris in 1913. ix

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1919–20 Completes the licence ès lettres (first university degree). 1920 Receives the diplôme d’études supérieures for his thesis The sigmatic futures and subjunctives of Old Latin, supervised by Joseph Vendryes (1875–1960). 1921 (3 May) Granted right of abode in France with legal rights. 1922 Enrols in the École des langues orientales (School of Oriental Languages). Together with his father, brother and sister, settles in Montmorency, a suburb ten miles north of Paris. Receives the agrégation de grammaire (teaching qualification), ranked ninth in the national competition. 1922–4 Teaches at the Collège Sévigné in Paris. 1924 (9 October) Becomes a naturalised French citizen. Changes his first name from Ezra to Émile. 1924–5 Spends eighteen months in Poona (south-east of Mumbai), British India, as tutor to the children of the Tata family, famous Indian industrialists. 1925 Co-signs three articles in L’Humanité: with Henri Barbusse, ‘Appel aux travailleurs intellectuels: oui ou non, condamnez-vous la guerre?’ (Call to intellectual workers: yes or no, do you condemn the war?);1 with friends in the Surrealist group (Louis Aragon, André Breton and Paul Éluard), ‘La Révolution d’abord et toujours’ (Revolution first and forever) and ‘“Clarté”, “Philosophies”, “La Révolution surréaliste” solidaire du Comité Central d’Action contre la guerre du Rif’  (‘Clarity’, ‘Philosophies’, ‘The Surrealist Revolution’ in solidarity with the Central Action Committee against the Rif War). 1925 (July) Signs the Manifesto of Intellectuals against the Rif War.



Biographical Timeline xi

1926 (May)–1927 (November) Military service as foot soldier in Morocco, despite his opposition to the Rif War. 1927–69 Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. 1935 Completes his doctoral theses Origines de la formation des noms en indo-européen (Origins of noun formation in IndoEuropean, primary thesis) and Les infinitifs avestiques (The Avestan infinitives, secondary thesis), and publishes them (both Paris: Maisonneuve, 1935). 1936 (26 February) Defends his theses on 26 February 1936, after which he is awarded the degree docteur ès lettres. 1937 Succeeds Antoine Meillet (1866–1936) in the Chair of Comparative Grammar of the Collège de France. 1940–1 Prisoner of war. Escapes, live clandestinely in France and takes refuge in Switzerland thanks to the help of Father Jean de Menasce (1902–1973), a polymath whose fields of interest include Zoroastrianism and Iranian studies, and who  gets  Benveniste a job as a librarian in the Université de Fribourg. 1942 (23 September) His brother Henri is arrested outside his home in Paris and deported to Auschwitz in Convoy 36, never to return.2 1956 Becomes Secretary of the Société de linguistique de Paris. (December) Suffers first heart attack. 1959–70 Secretary of the Société de linguistique de Paris. 1960 Elected Member of the Institute, Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. Author of the linguistics section of the Business Report of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).

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1963 Director of the Institute of Iranian Studies of the Université de Paris. 1964 Director of the Revue d’études arméniennes (Journal of Armenian studies). 1968 (25 August–1 September) President of the International Symposium of Semiotics at Warsaw. 1969 First President of the newly created International Association for Semiotic Studies. (6 December) Stroke which leaves him permanently paralysed and unable to speak. 1976 (3 October) Émile Benveniste dies at Versailles, where he is buried in the Cimetière des Gonards.

Notes 1 [Translator’s note (Tr.): The Rif War (1920–7) was fought in Morocco, initially between the colonial power Spain and Berber tribes in the Rif mountains. France joined the war on the side of Spain in 1925.] 2 [Tr.: There is some confusion about the arrest of Henri Benveniste. The French text calls him a victim of the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup, a joint operation by French and German police on 16–17 July 1942 in which over 13,000 Jews were arrested in Paris and confined in the Vélodrome d’Hiver (Winter Velodrome) before being shipped to concentration camps. But this is followed by the information about the arrest on 23 September outside his home and the precise number of the convoy, details which lend credence to the second account.]

Preface: Émile Benveniste, a Linguist Who Neither Says Nor Hides, but Signifies Julia Kristeva What makes a great linguist? Great linguists are distinguished by how, with their knowledge and analysis of languages, they discover properties of language through which they interpret and change speakers’ ‘being in the world’. I hazard this definition so as to put Émile Benveniste (1902–1976) into the perspective of certain of his predecessors whose work, although meticulous and cold in appearance, nonetheless contributed to and accelerated some of the most decisive steps in the human adventure. Think of the humanists and grammarians of the sixteenth century such as Scaliger and Ramus, whose analysis of the relationship between language and thinking, from Latin to the modern languages, helped to lay the ground for the development of national languages; of Lancelot and Arnauld, whose Grammaire générale et raisonnée (General and rational grammar, 1660), even more than their Logique de Port-Royal (Port-Royal logic, 1662), by introducing the notion of ‘sign’, by trying to determine ‘what is mental in language’ and by basing their judgement on ‘grammatical usage’, inscribed the Cartesian subject into the language’s syntax; of nineteenth-century ‘historicism’ and the comparative philology of Franz Bopp and Rasmus Rask, then finally Humboldt, who, extending Schlegel’s and Herder’s insights into the relationship of Sanskrit with the European languages, confirmed the weight of history in the evolutive activity of language. The tragic conflicts of the twentieth century tend to overshadow the fact that it was also a period of exceptional exploration of how language figures at the heart of the human condition: the central activity is the language which conditions, contains 1

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Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969

and clarifies all human experiences. Phenomenology, formal logic, analytic philosophy, structuralism, generative grammar, the human sciences interrogating in language the meaning of behaviours and institutions – not forgetting psychoanalysis, which annexes sex and trespasses on biology – d ­eveloped alongside an unprecedented explosion of literary forms, artistic avant-gardes and stylistic individualities that rocked the domain of letters. A lucid adventure which, in hindsight, seems to prefigure the explosion of systems of conventional signs and the tide of new virtual hyperlinks which promise as much freedom as chaos. In the middle of this profusion in which it is fully inscribed, the work of Émile Benveniste – if we take the trouble to tease out how the complexity of his thought resonates with the advances in philosophy and the human sciences and the new forms of art and literature – makes contact with the twentyfirst century and its challenges. For it profoundly clarifies the universal properties of languages underlying the creative freedom of the human mind, to which it unceasingly holds a stethoscope. Readers attentive to Benveniste’s trajectory, who do not let their attention get detoured toward a linguistics under pressure to produce technical innovations in a society losing meaning and encircled by political ‘spin’, will discover in his Last Lectures that his ‘general theories’ contribute to probing a deep logic which crosses over to our digital writing. Are they ‘chats’ lacking ‘subjectivity’, or on the contrary, routes to the ‘engenderment’ of new ‘signifiances’? Émile Benveniste was an austere scholar, a very great connoisseur of ancient languages, an expert in comparative grammar, an authority on general linguistics. He knew Sanskrit, Hittite, Tocharian, Hindi, Iranian, Greek, Latin, all the Indo-European languages, and in his fifties he plunged into American Indian languages. Yet his work, of an impressive daring, though restrained and modest on the surface, remains relatively little known, and less understood. Born in Aleppo, Syria, in 1902 to a polyglot Jewish family,1 Ezra Benveniste emigrated to France in 1913, enrolling in the ‘little seminary’2 of the Rabbinical School of France. His exceptional predisposition for languages drew the attention of

Preface 3 Sylvain Lévi, who introduced him to the great Antoine Meillet (or possibly it was Salomon Reinach who introduced them).3 Ezra Benveniste entered the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) in 1918, earned his licence ès lettres the following academic year, obtained the agrégation de grammaire in 1922, after which, as a pure product of the lay teaching of the French Republic, he became a naturalised French citizen in 1924 and chose the name Émile. During these student years he made close links with young philosophers and linguists, students of the École Normale Supérieure, all of them to a greater or lesser degree rebels, libertarians, antimilitarists, even communist sympathisers, and he notably crossed paths with the Surrealists. He left for India in 1924 as tutor in a family of wealthy industrialists, before having to fulfil his military duties in Morocco in 1926. On his return to France, he became the student of Meillet, whom he succeeded as Professor of Comparative Grammar and Director of Studies in the EPHE, where he exerted a strong influence on his colleagues. He entered the Collège de France in 1937, again succeeding Meillet in the Chair of Comparative Grammar. He was made prisoner of war in 1940–1, succeeded in escaping and taking refuge in Switzerland, at Fribourg (where also resided Balthus, Alberto Giacometti, Pierre Emmanuel and Pierre-Jean Jouve), and so escaped Nazi persecution, but in Paris his flat was looted and his brother Henri was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, to be murdered there in 1942. Along with the greatest names of the Jewish intelligentsia (Benjamin Crémieux, Georges Friedman, Henri Lévy-Bruhl, et al.), he signed the collective letter organised by Marc Bloch dated 31 March 1942 and addressed to the Union générale des israélites de France (UGIF), drawing attention to the Vichy policy making Jews a separate category of citizens, a prelude to their transportation to the death camps.4 After the war, Benveniste returned to teaching in the EPHE and the Collège de France, training several generations of students, carrying out linguistic field research in Iran, Afghanistan and then Alaska, and participated in numerous international linguistics conferences. He became a member of the Institute (Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres) in 1960, Director of the Institute of Iranian Studies in 1963, and President of the International Association

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Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969

for Semiotic Studies in 1969. On 6 December 1969 he suffered a stroke that left him handicapped for seven years, until his death, putting an end to his career. This concise biography of an ‘agnostic Israelite’, a French nomad, is above all that of a man who made language the path of a life, and through his work transmitted to us his thinking of this experience. Benveniste left an ‘unfinished’ body of work, it is sometimes said, in a phrase that risks diminishing the importance of the texts. Unfinished, certainly, the stroke having left the man in the intolerable situation of a great linguist deprived of speech and paralysed. But ‘unfinished’ too in an absolutely necessary sense, because such is the experience of language that he lived and theorised in a century during which diverse currents of thought, multiplying routes and interrogations on both the epistemological and aesthetic levels, imposed on the man anchored in his time the Heraclitean refusal to ‘say’, to construct a closed ‘message’, given definitively in a completed system. At the heart of this burgeoning diversity to which he was always attentive (from comparative philology to Saussure, from structuralism to Chomskyan syntax, from Surrealism to 1960s experimental literature), he practised what can only be called a Benvenistian style of thought, in which morphosyntactic detail joins the permanent interrogation of fundamental categories, linguistic and/or philosophical,5 and which is characterised, beyond the refusal to ‘say’, by an avoidance of the aestheticism that ‘hides’ (though he was once sensitive to it, as witnessed by his literary self-analysis, Eau virile [Virile water]),6 by the wish to ‘signify’ (open up to thinking, problematise, question) and to determine how signifying is engendered in the formal apparatus of language. What is it then to ‘signify’? The metaphysical question led Benveniste to look for a ‘material’ solution, in the very functioning of language: ‘this signifies’ is synonymous for him with ‘this speaks’, and so it is without recourse to any ‘external’ or ‘transcendental reality’, but in the ‘properties’ of language itself, that he prospects and analyses the possibilities of meaning-making which are specific to this ‘signifying organism’ that is the speaking human.

Preface 5 So the young man born in the heart of the Ottoman Empire, his studies funded by the Universal Israelite Alliance, did not become a rabbi.7 At a point in history when the Six-Day War (1967) and the Yom Kippur War (1973) had not yet aroused in many agnostic Israelites the desire to return to the God of their Fathers, it was through what Heraclitus said of the Lord whose oracle is at Delphi, ‘Oute légei, oute krýptei, alla semaínei’8 (unless it translates the unpronounceable tetragram YHWH: the being identified with what is and will be, with ‘signifiance’) that he resumed his ambition to study the ‘signifying power’ in the properties of language. A path, precisely, which ‘neither says nor hides, but signifies’, and which leads from the study of (explicitly) Presocratic Greece, the Bible and (implicitly) the Gospels, to that of the modern sciences produced by secularisation, and most especially general linguistics, which he set out to modulate in such a way that it could analyse how language is organised so as to create meaning (First Lecture).

Double Signifiance Benveniste thus apprehends ‘meaning’ by abstracting away its philosophical, moral or religious ‘value’. The search for meaning in its linguistic specificity is what ‘will command our discourse about languages’ in the Last Lectures restored here through the efforts of and with an Introduction by Jean-Claude Coquet and Irène Fenoglio. ‘For our part we posit [my italics: J. K.] that a language, in its essential nature which commands all the functions it can assume, is its signifying nature.’ The ‘signifiance’ which ‘informs’ the language thus posited is a property that ‘transcends’ ‘any use, particular or general’, or again a ‘characteristic we foreground: a language signifies’. He is speaking on 2 December 1968, seven months after the legendary May ’68. A naïve reader, then as now, is surprised: is this so original? What use is a language if it does not signify something? Of course. But do you know exactly what you mean by ‘signify’? And whether ‘communicate’, ‘mean’, ‘contain a message’ are not confused with ‘signify’? Central to the philosophy of language, but as a bearer of ‘truth’, meaning is not really the problem of linguists, Benveniste reminds us. Meaning

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is left ‘outside linguistics’:9 either ‘discarded’ because suspected of being too subjectivist, fleeting, indescribable by aspects of linguistic form; or recognised but ‘reduced’ (Leonard Bloomfield, Zellig Harris) to morphosyntactic structural variants, ‘distributional’, in a ‘given corpus’. For Benveniste, on the contrary, ‘signifying’ constitutes an ‘inner principle’ of language (Third Lecture). With this ‘new idea’, he emphasises, ‘we are thrown into a major problem, which embraces linguistics and beyond’. If certain precursors (John Locke, Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce) showed that we ‘live in a universe of signs’ of which the language is the first, followed by the signs of writing, of recognition, of rallying, etc. (First Lecture), Benveniste intends to show how the formal apparatus of the language enables it not only to ‘denominate’ objects and situations, but above all to ‘generate’ discourses with original significations, individual yet shareable in exchanges with others. Better still is how, not content with self-generation, the organism of a language also generates other sign systems that resemble it or increase its capacities, but amongst which it is the only signifying system capable of furnishing an interpretation. Benveniste’s papers collected in Volume 1 of his Problèmes de linguistique générale (PLG 1, Problems of general linguistics, Paris: Gallimard, 1966), whilst relying on the study of ancient languages and on comparative linguistics, already offered answers to these theoretical questions. A second Benveniste, clarifying and displacing the principal interrogations of his first general linguistics, appears in Volume 2 of Problèmes de linguistique générale (1974), published after he had suffered his stroke, in which are gathered together articles written from 1965 to 1969. A careful reading of these two volumes reveals two major stages in the evolution of his thinking, which readers of the present work need to be aware of in order to grasp fully the innovative approach of the Last Lectures. Starting in the first volume of his master work, the theoretician proposes a general linguistics which diverges from structural linguistics but also from the generative grammar that dominates the linguistic landscape of the period, and puts forward a linguistics of discourse, based on allocution and dialogue, opening the utterance toward the process of enuncia-

Preface 7 tion, subjectivity and intersubjectivity. In the wake of analytic philosophy (performative utterances) but also of Freudian psycho­analysis, Benveniste conceives of subjectivity in enunciation as a more complex emitter than the Cartesian subject, since he broadens it to the ‘intentional’ (borrowed from existential phenomenology). Additionally, and without appearing to, he sketches an opening toward the subject of the ‘unconscious’. Not really ‘structured like a language’ but worked by an (instinctual?) ‘anarchic force’ which language ‘restrains and sublimates’, although through ‘rips’ the force can introduce into the language a ‘new content, that of unconscious motivation and a specific symbolism’, ‘when the power of censorship is suspended’.10 A new dimension of general linguistics according to Benveniste is however revealed in the second volume. In dialogue with Saussure and his conception of signs as the distinctive elements of the linguistic system, Benveniste proposes two types in the signifiance of language: the semiotic and the semantic.11 The semiotic (from semeion ‘sign’, characterised by its ‘­ arbitrary’ link – the result of a social convention – between ‘­signifier’ and ‘signified’) is a closed, generic, binary, ­intralinguistic, systematising and institutional meaning, defined by a relationship of ‘paradigm’ and ‘substitution’. The semantic is expressed in the sentence which articulates the ‘signified’ of the sign, or the ‘intended’ (frequent allusions to the phenomenological ‘intention’ of Husserl, whose thought influences certain linguists such as Hendrik Josephus Pos). It is defined by a relationship of ‘connection’ or of ‘syntagm’, in which the ‘sign’ (the semiotic) becomes ‘word’ through the ‘activity of the speaker’. This activity activates the language in the discourse situation addressed by the ‘first person’ (I) to the ‘second person’ (you), the third (he/she) being situated outside discourse. ‘On this semiotic foundation, the language-discourse constructs a semantics of its own, a signification of the intended produced by the syntagmation of words in which each of them retains only a small part of the value that it has as a sign.’12 First formulated in a 1966 paper to the Congress of the Society of French Language Philosophy in Geneva,13 then in his 1968 address to the founding Warsaw Symposium of the

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International Semiotics Association,14 this dual conception of signifiance opens a new field of research. Benveniste insists on surpassing the Saussurean notion of the sign and of language as system, and underscores their importance, which is simultaneously intralinguistic – opening a new dimension of signifiance, that of discourse (the semantic), distinct from that of the sign (the semiotic)15 – and translinguistic – elaborating a metasemiotics of texts and works, on the basis of the semantics of enunciation.16 And he gives a more precise idea of the immense perspectives thus opened up: ‘We are utterly at the beginning’, therefore it is still ‘impossible to define in a general way’ where this orientation will lead, which, spanning linguistics, ‘will oblige us to reorganise the apparatus of the human sciences’.17 Benveniste’s Last Lectures pursue this reflection whilst relying on a new continent, that of poetic language, as witnessed by his manuscript notes devoted to Baudelaire,18 which develop the key notions of the lectures whilst relocating them. Between the second volume of the Problems of General Linguistics and the manuscripts devoted to poetic language, the Last Lectures propose first of all to show that ‘to signify’, which constitutes the ‘initial, essential and specific property of a language’, is not enclosed in the sign-units (as conceived by Saussure), but ‘transcends’ the communicative and pragmatic functions of language; and then, secondly, to specify the terms and strategies of this ‘signifiance’ insofar as it is a literally vital ‘experience’ (as he had suggested in ‘La forme et le sens’, PLG 2, p. 217: ‘Well before serving to communicate, language serves for living’). Very logically, Benveniste introduces this reflection through a homage to Saussure and Peirce. He recognises Saussure’s ‘particular importance’ and defines his work as a ‘new moment of analysis’, a ‘fundamental step in the history of thought’ (Lecture of 1 Dec. 1969) where, for the first time, ‘the notion of sign’ and of ‘science of signs’ take shape (Third Lecture). Regarding Peirce, he mentions the ‘universal notion’ of the sign divided into three ‘classes’ and detailed in multiple ‘categories’, based on ‘a triad’ that is again ‘universal’ (Second Lecture). But this lucid acknowledgement of debt to his predecessors offers an occasion to make their limitations uncompromisingly

Preface 9 clear. Thus Saussure ‘does not rely on the sign’; leaves open a possible ‘exteriority’ of the sign; does not take up the question of the relations between sign systems and the ‘specificity of the language’, which ‘produces’ (‘engenders’) new sign systems, insofar as it is their only ‘interpretant’; or again ‘does not apply himself to the language as production’ (Final Lecture). Peirce, for his part, does not base his theory on the language, but only on the word; his theory excels in its description of the numerous diversities of signs, but it ignores the language, and its logic lacks a systematic organisation of the different types of signs (Third Lecture).19 This inventory contributes to clarifying anew the challenge of Benveniste’s new general linguistics: ‘We need to prolong this reflection beyond the point indicated by Saussure’ (Fourth Lecture). And this, notably, by developing a ‘new relation’, absent in Saussure: the ‘relation of interpretation amongst systems’. The language, precisely – unique within the diversity of signifying systems in that it has the capacity to auto-interpret and to interpret other systems (music, image, kinship) – is ‘the interpreting system’: it ‘furnishes the basis of the relationships which permit the interpreted to develop as a system’. The language is, from this point of view, hierarchically the first of the signifying systems, which maintain amongst themselves a relationship of engenderment (Fifth Lecture).

Writing: Centre and Relay The ‘double signifiance’ of the language, as sketched above, is developed by the lever of writing, which realises and reveals its capacity for ‘production’ and ‘engenderment’. However, and although the term ‘writing’ is at the centre of philosophical and literary creation in France,20 the linguist does not refer to this explicitly, but constructs the concept of it within the frame of his general theory of the signifiance of the language. To distance himself from Saussurean semiology, which, by ‘confus[ing] writing with the alphabet and the language with a modern language’, postulates that writing is ‘subordinate to the language’ (Eighth Lecture), Benveniste interrogates the act of writing, the learning of writing and the types of writing that

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have developed across history. Taking care however to emphasise that he is not seeking the ‘origin of writing’, but the various solutions to the ‘graphic representation’ of signifiance (Ninth Lecture). It will first involve putting into question the ‘maximally intimate’ relation that the civilisation of the book has elaborated amongst writing, languages, speech and thinking, in other words, disentangling them in order to envisage writing ‘in itself and for itself’ as a particular ‘semiotic system’. Thus decoupled from speech, writing appears as a ‘high level of abstraction’: the writing speaker is extracted from ‘living’ verbal activity (gestural, phono-acoustic, connecting with another in a dialogue) and ‘converts’ it into ‘images’, into ‘hand-traced signs’. With consequent losses, certainly, as the image replaces speech as tool of ‘exteriorisation’ and ‘communication’. Yet subtle benefits make up for these losses, even abstracting away the ‘utilitarian’ function of writing (memorialising, transmitting, communicating messages). The ‘first great abstraction’, writing, by making language into a ‘distinct reality’, detached from its contextual and circumstantial richness, allows speakerwriters to realise that their language or thinking is made up of ‘words’ represented in material signs, in images. What is more, this ‘iconisation of thinking’ (Eighth Lecture) is the source of a ‘unique experience’ of the ‘speaker with himself’: the speaker ‘becomes aware’ that it is ‘not from pronounced speech, from language in action’, that writing proceeds. ‘Global’, ‘schematic’, ‘non-grammatical’, ‘allusive’, ‘rapid’, ‘incoherent’, this inner language, ‘intelligible to the speaker and to him alone’, confronts the speaker with the considerable task of carrying out a ‘conversion operation’ of his thinking into a form intelligible to others. Thus understood, the ‘iconic representation’ constructs speech and writing together: it ‘goes hand in hand with the elaboration of speech and the acquisition of writing’. At this stage of his theorisation, and contra Saussure, Benveniste remarks that, far from being ‘subordinate’, the iconic sign associates thinking with graphism and with verbalisation: ‘The iconic representation would develop in parallel with the linguistic representation’, which allows us to glimpse a different relationship

Preface 11 between thinking and icon, ‘less literal’ and ‘more global’ than the relationship between thinking and speech (Eighth Lecture). This hypothesis associating writing with ‘inner language’, which will be modified further on, takes up Benveniste’s previous enquiry into the ‘anarchic force’ of the Freudian unconscious.21 Would the ‘inner language’ that writing seeks to ‘represent’ be linked to the ‘failings’, ‘games’, ‘free ramblings’, the origin of which Benveniste, a reader of Freud and the Surrealists, would discover in the unconscious? The concise notes on writing in the Last Lectures recall the linguist’s earlier work, and complete the phenomenological intended which he inserts into the semantic of discourse through a ‘motivation’ of a different order. The ‘inner language’ of the speaker-writer would not be limited to the propositionality belonging to the transcendental ego of the conscious and its ‘intention’, but could evoke, in his theory of subjectivity, a diversity of subjective spaces: typologies or topologies of subjectivities in the engenderment of signifiance. Baudelaire’s ‘poetic experience’, we shall see, confirms and specifies this progress. As for the history of writing, it brings a new adjustment of the language/writing relationship, and constitutes a new step in Benveniste’s theory of signifiance. Pictographic writing, a sign of external reality, ‘recites’ a message already constituted by ‘the language of another’ (Ninth Lecture): it ‘does not speak’ in the sense that a speaking language is a ‘creation’. As far back as we can go in its prehistory, writing ‘describes’ ‘events’: if it is ‘parallel’ to language: it is not its ‘decal’. This observation raises a question that remains in suspense: does the specificity of the pictogram, which ‘recites’ (re-produces) but does not ‘create’ (does not produce), remain mutely latent in every iconisation of language? Isn’t this particularity more marked in certain modern writing systems (numerical, for example)? And if so, under what conditions? With what consequences for the subject of the enunciation? Two epoch-making revolutions in the history of writing shed light on the double signifiance of the language. The first lies in the discovery of a graphic mark (graphie) reproducing the phonè in a limited number of signs, which comes down to reproducing, no longer the content of the message as the bearer

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of events, but the message’s linguistic form. ‘Luck’ befalls China: less because in the monosyllabic Chinese language each semiotic unit is a formal unit which cannot be broken down (a word = a syllable) than through the inventive genius of those who conceived it, who succeeded in attributing a sign (graphè: character) to each ‘signifier’ (phonè) – with ‘keys’ to disambiguate homophones (Eleventh Lecture). To become aware of the flux of speech, to break words down, to realise that they are polysyllabic: this process entails a higherlevel segmentation. For polysyllabic languages, it will be segmentation into syllables, with variants: Sumerian and cuneiform writing where ‘The affiliation is clear between certain images and their referent’; its adaptation to Akkadian (Semitic); the ‘rebus’ method in Egyptian hieroglyphs (a picture = a syllable: /ša/ chat ‘cat’ + /po/ pot ‘pot’ = /ša po/ chapeau ‘hat’) (Tenth Lecture). A ‘decisive step’ in the history of the ‘graphic representations’ of a language is taken with Semitic alphabetic writing systems. Hebrew is a major example, which Benveniste does not develop here particularly, although he recalls its specific organisation: the consonantal schema carries the meaning (the semantic), whilst the grammatical function lies with the vowels. The Greek alphabet, in contrast, breaks down the syllable itself and gives the same status to consonants and vowels. This change reveals the role of the voice in every verbal articulation – ‘The breakdown unit of speech will thus be either a vowel or a segment including a vowel (CV or VC).’ For the linguist, too, the syllable is ‘a sui generis unit’ (Eleventh Lecture) which makes it possible to reproduce the ‘natural articulation of speech’ in writing and to materialise the grammatical relations with which this language makes subjective positions explicit in the act of enunciation. Two types of languages are defined by this metasemiotic treatment of the relation they have to writing: those in which etymology or semantics predominate (Phoenician and Hebrew); and those in which consonants are distinguished from vowels, and where grammatical variations, which often destroy etymological relationships, lead to a refinement of the inflectional system (morphological modifications by affixation expressing grammatical categories).

Preface 13 A ‘consubstantial’ relationship between writing and language is thus defined and can be expressed in these terms: the types of writing accomplish auto-semiotisation, that is, the becoming aware of the language types to which they correspond (‘the writing system has always and everywhere been the instrument that has permitted a language to semiotise itself’, Twelfth Lecture). Together, writing and language constitute different types of signifiance. And since languages understood as experiences of enunciation ‘contain’ the referent quite as much as the subjective experiences of speakers in their acts and discursive exchanges (First to Seventh Lectures), these types of writing systems reveal, consolidate and recreate very different ways of being in the world. Thus a rather clear ‘dividing line’ is drawn: to the East (in Mesopotamia, in Egypt and all the way to China) ‘civilisations of the written’ predominate, characterised by the primacy of writing, where the scribe (the ‘sage of calligraphy’ in China) plays a central role in the organisation of society; whereas to the West, in the Indo-European world, a devalorisation, even a certain ‘disdain’ of writing prevail (in Homer, graphoˉ merely signifies ‘scratch’) (Fourteenth Lecture). This barely sketched-out typology of signifiances across types of writing systems already appears rich in potentialities for research in semantics and in semiology of enunciation. Thus one could envision (Fourteenth Lecture), amongst other routes, determining the semiotic and semantic specificities of biblical texts, and of delving into the subjectivity of its speakers and its intended audience. Or enquiring into the opposition set up by Saint Paul between ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’: must it be understood as a dyad joining, on the one hand, the biblical semiotic (the ‘letter’) which is always already semantic in Hebrew words – through the polysemic imprint of graphism memorising the message or the tradition’s history – and, on the other hand, the discourse of an evangelical subjectivity which is actualised in the time of expression, of appearing and of discursive communication – manifested and clarified by the categories and modalities of Greek grammar? How do we understand that with ‘the new notions attached to the written/alphabetic’ there appears ‘lay civilisation’ (Fourteenth Lecture)? Must we deduce from this that the diversity of writing systems (notably by the

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­intermediary of translations from Latin into the vernacular languages) and other sign systems which widen the autosemiotisation of language in a secularised civilisation enhance its capacity for engendering meaning, and predispose the subjectivities present in it to create new signifying experiences? Or, on the contrary, that a certain ‘laicity’ coming in the wake of Christianity could privilege the semantic of a discourse for communicants, to the detriment of the semiotic of inner language? Without further exploring these barely sketched programmes, and without going in the direction of linguistic relativism either, but opening perspectives complementary to those proposed by Edward Sapir, Benveniste keeps strictly to the plane of general linguistics and marks a new step in its thinking. In the light of how different types of writing participate in the revelation and development of the double signifiance of languages, the author maintains that writing is not simply parallel to a language (and to language types), but that it prolongs them. Iconisation triggers and refines the language’s formalisation, so that writing is progressively lettered. ‘It semiotises everything’: writing is a sign system that ‘may be said to have a much closer resemblance to “inner language” than to the discourse chain’ (Twelfth Lecture). A new characteristic of ‘inner language’ is specified here: ‘before’ even the sacred scribe (who semanticises the language from the outset, by the semantic graphism of Semitic syllabic writing systems; or by inventing Chinese characters, where each signified has its image), it is logically inner language which ‘consecrates’ by formulating ‘myth’. And this ‘inner’ narrativity, this ‘train of ideas’, such as a writing of ‘globality’, tells a ‘whole story’. Is it all a kind of ‘fiction’, about which Husserl said that it constitutes the ‘vital element of phenomenology’? Or is it a Benvenistian variant of Freud’s ‘originary phantasm’, which is given to, and given by, ‘free associations’? Or again, does it have to do with these ‘narrative envelopes’ (much more than with ‘syntactic competences’) that cognitivists suppose are the first holophrases of the child beginning to speak? Certainly, whatever the case, poetic language – ‘internal to language’, ‘created by the choice and marrying of words’,22 and written in condensed metaphorical tales (one thinks of the verses of Baudelaire and Rimbaud: ‘Mother of memories, mistress of

Preface 15 mistresses’; ‘Vast as the night and as the light’; ‘Behold the Holy City, seated in the West’) – is a manifestation of it. Benveniste succinctly evokes this line of research, always returning to general linguistics and the signifying function that language fulfils. ‘Every social behaviour’, including relations of production and reproduction, does not pre-exist language, but ‘consists in being determined’. ‘Encircling’ or ‘containing’ the referent, a language ‘carries out a reduction of itself’ and ‘semiotises’ itself: writing being the ‘relay’ which makes this faculty explicit. In sum, writing makes explicit and definitively reinforces the non-instrumental and non-utilitarian nature of a language, which, because of this and more than ever, is neither a tool, nor communication, nor dead letter, but a ‘signifying organism’ (Aristotle, in Twelfth Lecture), generating and auto-generating. Having reached this point, Benveniste reverses the initial hypothesis concerning writing. As an ‘operation’ in the ‘linguistic process’, writing is ‘the founding act’ which has ‘transformed the face of civilisations’, ‘the most profound revolution humanity has known’ (Fourteenth Lecture). This particularity of writing in its relation to a language thus reinforces a final observation: the language and its writing ‘signify in exactly the same way’. Writing transfers signifiance from hearing to vision, it is ‘speech in a secondary form’. Since speech comes first, ‘writing is a transferred speech’. ‘Hand and speech stand together in the invention of writing’, writes Benveniste. The writing/speech relation is equivalent to the relation of heard speech to enunciated speech. Writing reappropriates speech in order to transmit, communicate, but also recognise (this is the semiotic) and understand (this is the semantic). Writing is a stakeholder in the language’s interpretance. This relay of speech fixed in a system of signs remains a system of speech, on condition of the latter being understood as a signifiance susceptible to further engenderments by other sign systems. All the way to online blogs and Twitter . . . It is certainly not by chance if, at the heart of this work in progress on the modalities of the specific signifiance of language, there intervenes a recollection of Plato’s Philebus: within the variety of human sensations and pleasures, each One is an

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Infinity, and the only way of opposing the absence of limits in the state of nature is to have recourse to numbers, thanks to which it becomes possible to delimit the units in a hierarchical order, to dissociate and to identify. Like the ‘notes’ in music, the letters in grammar (grammatikē technē) are ‘numbers’: in this sense the activity of the grammarian, who enumerates and organises the semiotic in language, beneath the level of signification, is ‘divine’ (Thirteenth Lecture). Recalling this parallel between the analysis of language and the work of the Egyptian Theuth (Thōth in Greek) who was the first to perceive that vowels are ‘infinitely multiple’, Benveniste appropriates the idea of ‘number’ to articulate the idea of limit, unavoidable in ­linguistics – which is about ‘dissociating and identifying units on several levels’, ‘arriving at numbers/at a limit’ – and the idea of the creation of the world through the Word. But it displaces the onto-theology of transcendent meaning and weaves the connotations of this ‘transcendence’ (announced in the First Lecture), always inflected inside language, and continuing to construct itself under the eyes of the reader of these lectures: ‘The man instructed in letters, the grammatikos, is the man instructed in the structure of the language.’ ‘The relationship of the one and the multiple is found simultaneously in knowledge (epistēmē) and in the experience of sensations’ (Thirteenth Lecture). Step by step, Benveniste’s theory thus integrates every referent and, implicitly, the infinity of the res divina – by definition external to the human world – in and through the signifiance of language. On this score he relies on Socrates, as we have seen, to whom could be added the fourth book of the Pentateuch, the Book of Numbers, or the Kabbala, which constructs meaning by enumerating. But more than any other, the fourth Gospel, that of John, seems to be the touchstone for this dual signifiance of the language, encompassing its graphic representation, the act of writing and the variants of writing systems, as well as intersubjectivity and the referent: ‘In the Beginning was the Word.’ With this slight difference, that, without ‘beginning’, the ‘divine’ is reabsorbed into the engenderment of the ‘folds’ (Leibniz) of signifiance:23 in the elements and categories of this ‘datum’ that is language. Linguists never seek the ‘truth’ conditions of this datum, nor its infinite translinguistic configura-

Preface 17 tions, potential and future, but are content to ‘try to recognise its laws’.24

Signifiance and Experience Taken at its ‘fundamental’ level (as distinct from ‘contingent’ empirical languages), once the language system has become ‘signifiance’ it is not simply a complement added to the theory of the Saussurean sign coextensive with the ‘social contract’. In taking up the idea that linguistic structures and social structures are ‘anisomorphic’, Benveniste strives to show that the act of signifying is irreducible to communication and institutions, and that it only transcends the ‘given meaning’ through the ‘activity of the speaker put at the centre’. The notion of ‘enunciation’ understood as an ‘experience’ considerably modifies the object of signifiance and/or of language.25 Far from abandoning the ‘sign’, signifiance includes it in ‘discourse’ as an intersubjective illocutionary act which transmits ‘ideas’. Signifiance is a syntagmatic organisation comprising the various types of syntactic constructions, and on that account ‘contains’ the ‘referent’ of Saussurean linguistics,26 on condition of enriching it with the ‘unique situation’, the ‘event’ of the enunciation which implies ‘a certain positioning of the speaker’. The ‘experience’ of the subject of the enunciation in the intersubjective situation is what interests the linguist, but as it transverses the ‘formal apparatus’ of the ‘intended’: that is, the ‘instruments of its attainment’ as much as the ‘processes through which linguistic forms are diversified and engendered’. The ‘singular dialectic of subjectivity’, ‘independent of any cultural determination’, had certainly been proclaimed previously (PLG 2, p. 68). But through writing, the Last Lectures deepen the ‘engenderment’ of signifiance by displacing subjective experience from a dialogic exchange of I and you toward a topology of the subject of the enunciation that downgrades Descartes’ ego cogito as well as the Husserlian transcendental ego. The terms designating this dynamic of language vary: ‘engenderment’, but also ‘functioning’, ‘conversion’ of the language into writing and into discourse, ‘diversification’; the language being defined as ‘production’, ‘moving landscape’, ‘place of

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transformations’. But contrary to the ‘transformations’ which interest generative grammars and for which syntactic categories are immediately given, the ‘engenderment’ of signifiance according to Benveniste is deeply engaged in the coming about of pre- and translinguistic signification, and involves three types of engenderment relationships: a relationship of interpretance (a fundamental property, a language being ‘the only system that can interpret everything’); a relationship of engenderment (between sign systems: from alphabetic writing to Braille); a relationship of homology (with reference to Baudelaire’s ‘correspondences’). The final lecture revisits each of these, whilst recalling the necessity of revising the ‘formal categories’ (‘cases’, ‘tenses’, ‘moods’), and posits that ‘the entire inflectional apparatus is in question here’. The subject of the enunciation must himself be affected by this mobility. In this moving landscape of the language, and with regard to the writing which has contributed to making it appear, reflection was required on the specific experience of writing that ‘poetic language’ represents. In fact, Benveniste, in counterpoint to the structuralist reading of Baudelaire’s ‘Les chats’ by Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss,27 and echoing the indications of the Last Lectures, raises the topic in his manuscript notes on Baudelaire of the same period (1967–9). Closer to ‘inner language’ than to discourse, poetic language requires the analyst to ‘change instruments’, as Rilke put it (noted, we have seen, by the young Benveniste). This ‘different language’ that poetry would constitute necessitates therefore a ‘translinguistics’, because the ‘signifiance of art’ is ‘unconventional’ and because its ‘terms’, which proceed from the specific individualities of each writer-subject, are ‘unlimited in number’. Immediately, Benveniste establishes what the individualities of this ‘translinguistics’ are: the poetic message, ‘exactly reversing the properties of communication’,28 speaks an emotion that language ‘transmits’ but does not ‘describe’.29 Similarly, the referent of poetic language is ‘inside the expression’, whereas in everyday language the object is outside language. It ‘proceeds from the poet’s body’, ‘these are muscular impressions’, Benveniste specifies. Poetic language, ‘sensitive’, ‘is addressed only to the entities which participate in this new community: the poet’s

Preface 19 mind, God/Nature, the absent one/the creature of memories and of fiction’. Why does Benveniste choose Baudelaire to illustrate his proposition? Because he brought about the ‘first fissure between poetic language and non-poetic language’, whereas in Mallarmé this break is already consummated.30 Contemporaneously with the Last Lectures, these notes on Baudelaire’s poetic experience connect with Benveniste’s reflections on the ‘anarchic force’ at work in the unconscious and which the language ‘restrains and sublimates’.31 The expression of an ‘instantaneous and elusive subjectivity which forms the condition of dialogue’, this experience participates in the infraand the supra-linguistic,32 or rather in the translinguistic.33 The translinguistic, which applies to works, will be based on the semantic in the enunciation. These last reflections, attentive to the poetics of ancient India as they appear in the sacred texts thoroughly mastered by Benveniste the Sanskritist, resonated with the end of the 1960s, a time when social and generational upheaval, calling for ‘power to the imagination’, sought secret and innovative logics of meaning and existence in the experience of writing (avant-garde or feminist). In hindsight, and in the absence of any explicit reference to psychosexuality, it is not the Freudian theory of sublimation that this general linguistics of experience and subjectivity brings to mind, but the journey – unnamed – of Martin Heidegger. Indeed, according to Being and Time (1927), language is discourse (Rede) or speech, words having no signification outside the Mitsein of dialogue. It is the responsibility of Dasein to interpret: its localisation in the existential analytic is taken into consideration, to the detriment of language as such. We are overly dependent on certain resonances between this early conception of language in Heidegger and the early general linguistics of Benveniste (PLG 1, 1966), which proposed placing the formal apparatus of this language regime – ‘discourse’ and ‘interpretant’ – in society and nature. The Heideggerian approach changes in On the Way to Language (1959), where language is envisaged as ‘the said’, Sage, ‘what is spoken’. Dialogue becomes monologue, without however being solipsistic, but, inasmuch as it is ‘inner discourse’, never

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propositional, without ‘sound’ or ‘­communication’, its ‘inner thinking’ achieves in silence the mental production of a ‘coming into language’. For Benveniste, writing as graphism and as poetic experience – from Baudelaire to surrealism – seems to cross Heidegger’s definition of ‘language that speaks only and solitarily with itself’, and makes sonority possible. But to distance itself from it immediately, since the allusive remarks of the Last Lectures and the manuscript notes on Baudelaire place this ‘letting go’ which would be the essence of language, deafly threatened with becoming ‘meaningless’ in the later Heidegger, in apposition (more than opposition) to the vigilance of the linguist, for whom ‘discourse includes both the limit and the unlimited’, ‘unity and diversity’ (Thirteenth Lecture). In fact, Benveniste never fails to insist on ‘syntagmation’ – probably ‘reflecting a necessity of our cerebral organisation’34 – which confers on the ‘instrument of language’ its capacity to encode whilst codifying, to limit whilst being limited, and thus to assure the semantic of an intelligible discourse; communicative, engaged with reality. He adds however that, parallel to the language, and as its relay, writing as graphic representation and as poetic experience, although closer to ‘inner language’ than to ‘discourse’, does not eliminate its pragmatic virtues. But it risks shifting the boundaries of the language by engendering signifying systems that are singular (the poem) and yet shareable in the ‘interpretance’ of the language itself. Neither institutional tyranny nor dreaming hymn, signifiance as sketched by Benveniste at the end of his career is a space of freedom.

‘Linguistics is universal’35 Today everyone communicates, but rare are those who perceive the consistency and the full extent of language. At the time when Benveniste was giving his Last Lectures, the idea that language determines humans in a different and more profound way than social relationships do was starting to become a dangerous way of thinking: a veritable revolt against conventions, the ‘Establishment’, the ‘Police State’, doctrinaire Marxism and communist regimes. In Warsaw, in Italy, in Czechoslovakia, in the Soviet-controlled Baltic republics and elsewhere, semiology

Preface 21 was synonymous with freedom of thought. Rather logically, it was in Paris (where French research was exhibiting great dynamism, whether through the Semiology Section of the Social Anthropology Laboratory of the Collège de France, the journal Communications or the publications of Émile Benveniste, Roland Barthes and Algirdas Julien Greimas, amongst others) that the idea took shape of bringing these international currents together. And it was logical too that, under the inspired authority of Roman Jakobson, Benveniste’s presidency was imposed on all. The International Symposium of Semiotics, created in August 1968, was to furnish the foundations of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (AIS), of which Émile Benveniste officially became President in 1969. As a young Bulgarian student benefitting from a French government scholarship, I had the privilege, along with the linguist Josette Rey-Debove, of being put in charge of the scientific secretariat of the publication ‘Recherches sémiotiques’ (Semiotic inquiry), first under UNESCO’s Social Science Information unit, then under the AIS. This context, following my passionate reading of the first volume of Problems in General Linguistics, gave me the opportunity of forming an exceptional personal bond with Émile Benveniste. Our meetings took place at his home, in the rue Monticelli, near the Porte d’Orléans. Still today I remember his office as a ‘sacred’ place (so it appeared to the timid girl I then was), in which the great scholar, with his smile of vivid intelligence, seemed to guard the secrets of the immemorial Indo-European and Iranian worlds. It was a rather dark office, where books carpeted the walls and strewed the floor, old library stock of which the odour, mixed with the steam of tea which, along with dry biscuits that we never touched, for me evoked ancient parchment scrolls. The administrative details quickly dispensed with, the professor enquired about my work.36 With an insatiable curiosity, he was as interested in the linguistic and philosophical debates in Eastern Europe (Bakhtin’s ‘dialogism’) as he was in literary innovations (then in full flower, with the ‘Groupe théorique’ of Philippe Sollers’s journal Tel Quel which met at 44 rue de Rennes). During these meetings Benveniste acted as teacher, protector and attentive listener. I recall asking him whether writing was an ‘infra-’ and

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‘supra-’linguistic process (as he was describing it in connection with dreams) or instead translinguistic; putting it to him that Raymond Roussel’s writing could be defined as a ‘productivity’ defying the ‘product’; discovering, when he was talking to me about Jakobson’s work, the notion of ‘spotha’ (simultaneously ‘sound’ and ‘sense’ and always ‘activity’, according to the Indian grammarians). I remember the professor advising me to read on this subject Madeleine Biardeau’s recent book on language in classical Brahmanism; how, on another occasion, he expressed regret that Harris and Chomsky had founded a general syntax without taking account of the diversity of languages (‘It is regrettable to know only a single language’, he had written to a renowned linguist). Most often, he replied to my questions with terse and tolerably provocative remarks: ‘You know, I’m only interested in little things. The verb “to be”, for example.’ And advising me to consult, after his Problems in General Linguistics, a recent publication on this immense subject in a recent issue of the very serious journal Foundations in Language . . .37 Or else, as an answer to my interrogations, he opened the Sanskrit text of the Rigveda, to translate appropriate passages for me directly into French. Then, after some semantic or grammatical remarks, he returned to the contents of the ‘tale’ and to the ‘characters’ of this great collection of hymns from ancient India, always with an allusive tone and a hint of irony (concerning Aragon, for instance): ‘Do you think, Madame, that woman is the future of man?’ On another day, when I had just discovered the term ‘senefiance’ in the ‘soul’s voyage toward God’ dear to the mediaeval theoreticians of the ‘modi significandi’, I asked him what he thought about it. ‘You read a lot for your age’, he replied. ‘I think that, closer to us, Jean Paulhan’s father used to use this term. People still read in Bulgaria, and in Eastern Europe in general, don’t they? You know that čitati, the Slavic root for “to read”, goes back to the meaning of “to count”, as well as “to respect”.’ I had not thought about it, obviously; I did not know very much. He never told me that his parents had been teachers in Samokov, Bulgaria. Only that I reminded him of his mother: a distant resemblance, I suppose.

Preface 23 Husserl’s phenomenology interested him a great deal, and he seemed astonished that I had some modest bits of knowledge of his Ideen. But we never mentioned Heidegger, whom I had only just discovered. In Warsaw, I had brought along Antonin Artaud’s Letters from Rodez. ‘Would you mind lending it to me?’, he asked. Émile Benveniste hid the little book under the symposium handouts and I saw that, with a shy smile on his lips, he permitted himself to read it when a speaker or a debate became tedious. Encouraged by this evidence of freedom, and having recently spotted his name alongside those of Artaud, Aragon, Breton, Éluard, Leiris and a whole constellation of intellectuals, artists and writers who had signed the Surrealist Manifesto ‘Revolution First and Forever’ (1925), during the break I asked our future President, ‘Monsieur, what a joy to discover your name amongst the signers of a Surrealist manifesto.’ ‘An unfortunate coincidence, Madame.’ The smile had vanished, a cold and empty look nailed me to the floor, and I slumped in shame before the group of conference participants around us. A few hours later and with no witnesses, the Professor whispered in my ear, ‘Of course it was I, but it must not be said. You see, now I am in the Collège de France.’ On our return to Paris, he invited me to take tea, this time at a café, the Closerie des lilas. ‘It was here that we used to meet. A violent time, the war. But here too there was bloodshed, within the group itself.’ Seeing my surprise, he added: ‘No, the metaphor is not too strong. I quickly realised that I did not belong here.’ Today I reread the Manifesto.38 Indeed. Benveniste had fled the calls to insubordination, abandoned the bloody StalinistTrotskyite revolt (Breton and Aragon), ignored the maddening experience of the poetic infinite – which, released from the social contract, takes away the order of language (Mallarmé: ‘One single guarantee, syntax’) in a vocal explosion (Artaud’s glossolalia) – in order to consecrate himself in a sort of priesthood to signifiance in the logics of language. Academic convention provided this nomad tempted by the conflagration, this ‘poor linguist scattered in the universe’, with a protection and

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a necessary brake. But it did not stop him from reaching out to dissident thinking under communism – the end of which, marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall, he did not live to see; but the Warsaw Symposium appears in hindsight as one of its foreshadowings. Nor did it discourage him from listening for the trace of free and creative subjectivity in the duality of signifiance: between the nameless experience of ‘inner language’ and the semantic of discourse which is used to communicate and to put in order. I remember our last conversation, the end of November or start of December 1969. He had received my book Sèméiôtikè and, benevolent as always, was hoping to finish reading it and to speak to me about it in detail before the vacation. But soon, suddenly, came the shock: the news of the stroke, the paralysis, the aphasia. The administration of the Collège de France and his colleagues took care of all the customary formalities. At the hospital I found his sister Carmelia, heroic in her devotion and sensitivity, who stayed by his side day after day, right up to the end, in miserable conditions. She spoke to me in particular of Benveniste’s long-time friend Father Jean de Menasce, whom I did not meet, but whose personal experience of recovering from a similar illness gave her total confidence that her brother would do the same. The situation was deplorable: the patient was hospitalised in a ward, where each day he had to tolerate unhealthy company and the unwelcome visits of other patients’ families, without any rehabilitative care. The general impression was that the patient no longer understood speech. ‘But he never reacted much to family news before his stroke, it bored him’, Carmelia Benveniste reminded people. We managed to get the great aphasia specialist François Lhermitte to come and apply his expertise; he asked Benveniste to draw a house. No reaction. Terrified at the thought of the expertise running out, I made an effort to ask the patient myself. He drew the house. A programme of speech therapy was then put in place. The result was judged unconvincing. His faithful disciple Mohammed Djafar Moïnfar and I soon realised that it was impossible to find a better place in a private establishment – the absent-minded scholar not having paid his insurance premiums to the Mutuelle générale de l’Éducation nationale, I

Preface 25 was told. We thought of asking all his friends for a contribution, to sort out the insurance retroactively, but various administrative difficulties stood in the way. Still today, I reproach myself for not having attended his rehabilitation sessions: the affection in which he held me, perhaps, might have made him more cooperative. An illusion, no doubt, but one I still think about. It had often seemed to me that his foreign students and friends were the most motivated, the most conscious of his distress and of the magnitude of his work. I was persuaded that he was still present intellectually. So one day I asked him to autograph a copy of his first book, The Persian Religion According to the Chief Greek Texts (1929), which I had found in English translation in an Orientalist antiquarian bookshop. With trembling handwriting, he inscribed his name in large capital letters, É. BENVENISTE, adding the date 23-9-1971, which he immediately corrected to 24-91971: thus he remained present in the interlocutory act, and retained the notion of time. In 1971, the special issue of the journal Langages on ‘The Epistemology of Linguistics’, which I edited, was dedicated to him: ‘Homage to Émile Benveniste’ – which gave him joy. Pierre Nora, the editor of Gallimard’s Bibliothèque des Sciences Humaines, and I brought him as well the second volume of his Problems in General Linguistics. In 1975, a collection edited by Nicolas Ruwet, Jean-Claude Milner and me, with the title Langue, discours, société: Pour Émile Benveniste (Language, discourse, society: For Émile Benveniste) was dedicated to him, published by the Éditions du Seuil. He received it with pleasure. Of course reading these works was exhausting, and no doubt he appreciated their existence even more than the details they contained. After that, alas, the nine hospital transfers he underwent in seven years, my thesis for the doctorat d’État, then motherhood made my visits rarer and rarer. But he did not forget me, and in November 1975 a letter from Carmelia Benveniste informed me that the professor was asking expressly to see me. He still managed to express his wishes, and remembered those whom he wished to see again. During one of these meetings, at the hospital of Créteil, he asked me to come close to his bedside, sat up, held up his index finger and, very shyly, with the same adolescent smile, began

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to ‘write’ on the blouse that covered my breast. Surprised, as much bowled over as bothered, I did not dare to move and could not divine what he was hoping to write or draw in this strange gesture. I asked him whether he wanted something to drink, read or listen to. He shook his head no, and began once more to trace on my breast these disturbing and indecipherable signs. I finally handed him a sheet of paper and a ballpoint pen. Then, with the same writing in large capitals that he had used to autograph his book for me, he traced: THEO. I hardly knew at the time – was it 1972 or 1973? – that Benveniste had arrived in France as a student of the Rabbinical School. Nor had he spoken to me about the Shoah. I did not have a global vision of his works in general linguistics, the second volume of his Problems in General Linguistics not yet having been put together, and in any case my insufficient knowledge would not have allowed me to assimilate it. But I was persuaded that his verbal paralysis had not completely destroyed his intelligence. This THEO meant something. Today, reading his last writings in the light of his published work, I do not pretend to offer you an interpretation: THEO will remain for me forever enigmatic. I am merely sketching a reading. The chances of our respective personal histories had put me on his route, so that he might recall to me, before dying, a message that he needed to trace on a body: Whatever ‘the semantic’ may be in our discourse (such as we communicate it through dialogues in our temporal existences), the diversity of our languages and the language itself engender this ‘semiotic capacity’ (borne witness to by the unpronounceable graphism /YHWH/, but which the professor had undertaken to analyse with the tools of Greek onto-theology /THEO/ and thanks to its scientific continuations) in the meeting of the ‘inner languages’ of our subjectivities. This ‘original force of the work’ (Seventh Lecture) ‘transcends’ (/THEO/) every other property of language, and ‘one does not conceive’ that ‘its principle is found elsewhere than in a language’. ‘I’, every speaking person, consist in this duality, stand at this crossroads. ‘I’, every person, experience this ‘SIGNIFIANCE’ which grasps and interprets history.

Preface 27 I shall be grateful to readers of these Last Lectures for adding their own path to this crossroads, to this writing.

Notes   1 His mother, Maria Benveniste (born in Vilnius, now in Lithuania), taught Hebrew, French and Russian at the school of the Universal Israelite Alliance in Samokov, Bulgaria; his father, Mathatias Benveniste (born in Smyrna), spoke Ladino; the linguistic environment of his early childhood included Turkish, Arabic, Modern Greek, probably Slavic. Many great linguists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of Jewish origin, came to the study of languages through the multilingualism of their family milieu (the brothers James and Arsène Darmesteter, Michel Bréal, Sylvain Lévi).   2 A ‘Talmud Torah’ school intended to give students a grounding in Jewish culture, lead them to the baccalaureate and allow them to prepare for the rabbinate. The students were taught Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German and, with very particular care, French.   3 See Françoise Bader, ‘Sylvain Lévi’, Anamnèse, no. 5: Trois linguistes (trop) oubliés (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010), pp. 141–70.   4 The signers urged the UGIF ‘to maintain as close a union as possible between our French brethren and us [. . .] to attempt nothing [. . .] that might isolate us morally from the national community to which, even after being slapped with this law, we remain faithful’. See Marc Bloch, L’étrange défaite (The strange defeat, Paris: Gallimard, 1946), pp. 314–19.   5 The most concrete example of this is his Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, 2 vols (Paris: Minuit, 1969; English version, Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society, trans. Elizabeth Palmer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016; trans. first published as Indo-European Language and Society, Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1973).   6 Echoing Rilke, this condensed and allusive confession expresses the young linguist’s longing for the mother he left behind at the age of eleven, and did not see again before her death when he was seventeen. Sensitive to the ‘latent virile violence’ which attracts him beneath the ‘superficially feminine’ appearances of a maternal that is vigorous and ‘robust as a man’, Benveniste composed

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his self-portrait in the guise of the poets (bachelors?), from Homer (the ‘Old man of the sea’) to Lautréamont (‘Old Ocean, o great bachelor!’). See Philosophies, no. 1, 15 mars 1924, year of the publication of the First Surrealist Manifesto.  7 The Rabbinical School in the rue Vauquelin trained rabbis in Europe for communities in the Middle East and Africa, ‘as teachers were trained for schools’. In a letter of October 1918, his mother wrote that her son Ezra’s ‘situation in the school’ had ‘become untenable’: he was drawn to languages and would do his studies in the humanities (see Françoise Bader, ‘Une anamnèse littéraire d’É. Benveniste’, Incontri Linguistici, no. 22, Rome, 1999, p. 20).  8 Cited by Benveniste in ‘La forme et le sens dans le langage’ (Form and meaning in language), in Le langage II: Sociétés de Philosophie de langue française, Actes du XIIIe Congrès, Genève, 1966 (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1967), pp. 29–40, repr. in PLG 2, pp. 215–38, p. 229.   9 ‘La forme et le sens’, PLG 2, p. 216. 10 ‘Remarques sur la fonction du langage dans la découverte freudienne’ (Remarks on the function of language in Freud’s discovery), La psychanalyse 1 (1956), 3–16, repr. in PLG 1, pp. 75–87, p. 78. 11 [Tr.: Kristeva emphasises Benveniste’s innovative use of a masculine definite article with these normally feminine nouns. La sémiotique is ‘semiotics’; le sémiotique is ‘the semiotic’, i.e. what is semiotic in nature. La sémantique is ‘semantics’; le sémantique is ‘the semantic’.] 12 ‘La forme et le sens’, PLG 2, p. 229. 13 Published as ‘La forme et le sens’. 14 ‘Sémiologie de la langue’ (Semiology of the language), Semiotica 1 (1969), 1–12, 127–35, repr. in PLG 2, pp. 43–66. 15 It would be Antoine Culioli who brought this project to fruition in his ‘theory of enunciative operations’, by studying the activity of language across the diversity of national languages. 16 ‘Sémiologie de la langue’, PLG 2, p. 66. 17 ‘La forme et le sens’, PLG 2, p. 238. 18 These manuscripts in the Benveniste Archive of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF PAP OR DON 0429, env. 6 à 22) have been published as Émile Benveniste, Baudelaire, ed. Chloé Laplantine (Limoges: Lambert-Lucas, 2011).

Preface 29 19 However, Benveniste borrows from the American philosopher the term ‘interpretant’, specifying that he only uses this ‘isolated denomination’ and, above all, in a ‘different’ sense (Fifth Lecture), presumably phenomenological. Peirce’s ‘thirdness’ could however have shored up the structure of the subject of the enunciation (an ‘Oedipal’ structure for Freud) in the semiotic according to Benveniste. 20 With Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (1953), Elements of Semiology (1965); Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967), Voice and Phenomenon (1967), and in the literary domain, after the nouveau roman, with Philippe Sollers, Drama (1965), Logiques (Logics, 1968), Nombres (Numbers, 1968), Writing and the Experience of Limits (1971). 21 ‘Remarques sur la fonction’. 22 See BnF PAP OR DON 0429, env. 22, f. 8. 23 See Julia Kristeva, ‘L’engendrement de la formule’ (Engenderment of the formula), in Sèméiôtikè: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Sèméiôtikè: Research for a semanalysis, Paris: Seuil, 1969), p. 290: ‘The numerical function of the signifier’. 24 ‘La forme et le sens’, PLG 2, p. 238. 25 Benveniste, ‘Le langage et l’expérience humaine’ (Language and human experience), Diogène 51 (1965), 3–13, repr. in PLG 2, pp. 67–78, and ‘L’appareil formel de l’énonciation’ (The formal apparatus of enunciation), Langages 5/17 (1970), 12–18, repr. in PLG 2, pp. 79–88. 26 [Tr.: référent ‘referent’ (commonly used to translate Gottlob Frege’s Bedeutung) is not a term used by Saussure, but came into later linguistics and semiotics through C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards’s The Meaning of Meaning (1923), which introduced it in the course of criticising Saussure for disconnecting the linguistic sign from things in the world.] 27 Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘“Les chats” de Charles Baudelaire’, L’Homme 2/1 (1962), 5–21. 28 BnF PAP OR DON 0429, env. 20, f. 204. 29 Ibid., env. 12, f. 204. 30 Ibid., env. 23, f. 358. 31 ‘Remarques sur la fonction’, PLG 1, p. 78. 32 Ibid., p. 86. 33 ‘Sémiologie de la langue’, PLG 2, p. 66.

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34 ‘La forme et le sens’, PLG 2, p. 226. 35 Letter from Benveniste to Georges Redard, 17 Oct. 1954: ‘Linguistics is universal, but the poor linguist is scattered in the universe’, cited by Redard, below, p. 129. 36 I was finishing my doctoral thesis (3e cycle), which I defended in June 1968, exceptionally, in my capacity as a foreign student: and I was starting my research on the poetic language of Mallarmé and Lautréamont with a view to a thesis for the doctorat d’État. 37 See Charles H. Kahn, ‘The Greek verb “to be” and the concept of being’, Foundations in Language 2/3 (Aug. 1966), 245–65. 38 ‘We consider bloody Revolution to be the ineluctable vengeance of the humiliated spirit. We [. . .] conceive of it only in its social form [. . .] The idea of revolution is the best and most effective safeguard of the individual.’

Translator’s Introduction John E. Joseph

Émile Benveniste (1902–1976) and the Lectures This book includes the full course of fifteen lectures which Benveniste gave in the Collège de France, on the rue des Écoles in Paris, between December 1968 and March 1969 (divided by the editors into Chapters 1 and 2), plus the first lecture of the following year’s course, delivered on 1 December 1969 (Chapter 3). The circumstances which led to this being his last ever lecture are detailed in the biographical account by Georges Redard (pp. 129–30). Some brief notes which Benveniste made in preparation for the undelivered second lecture scheduled for 8 December 1969 are included in Chapter 3. Benveniste’s name will be recognised by many in linguistics, semiotics and critical theory who have seen his work referred to reverentially, but have not necessarily read it themselves. It has been of real importance in four domains: • Indo-European comparative-historical linguistics, particularly the Indo-Iranian sub-branch, and particularly morphology • the etymology of Indo-European languages, and the evidence to be drawn from it concerning the historical development of social institutions, with ‘social’ broadly construed • the concept of the linguistic sign and its inner workings • the development of a uniquely Benvenistean approach to language based on l’énonciation ‘enunciation’, which looks at language production within the broader human context, in parallel with the detached, self-regulating language system as conceived by structural linguistics. 31

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This is far from covering all the areas his work dealt with. His paper on rhythm in language,1 for example, was the springboard for the linguistics-cum-poetics of Henri Meschonnic (1932– 2009), now gaining a growing audience.2 But the four listed above are the areas in which Benveniste’s impact has been greatest. Starting in 2004, the linguist and manuscript specialist Irène Fenoglio began examining Benveniste’s archives in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, which include his notes for the 1968–9 lectures. She teamed up with Jean-Claude Coquet, who had attended the lectures and kept his own notes of them. Notes taken by two other linguists who attended the lectures were also located, Jacqueline Authier-Revuz for Chapters 1 and 2, and Claudine Normand (1934–2011) for Chapter 3. All these documents were collated in order to reconstruct the text of the lectures insofar as possible. In this translation, Benveniste’s own notes appear in regular type, with the additions from attendees’ notes in a different typeface.

None of the notes being verbatim transcriptions, the results cannot be taken to include all that Benveniste said. Those in attendance were not taking notes for a course on which they would be examined, since the Collège de France did not award degrees. Lectures given there are open to the public, and the single restriction placed on its professors is that they must never repeat a lecture. The volume includes supplementary material contributed by Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov (1939–2017), each of whom attended Benveniste’s lectures at various times in the 1960s and had a personal connection with him; plus substantial parts of a biography of Benveniste written by his confidant, the linguist Georges Redard (1922–2005). The Dernières leçons have had a considerable success, not just on account of the new ideas that Benveniste was developing in what proved to be the final stage of his career, but also because of how the lecture format encouraged a clearer exposition of some of the earlier ideas for which he was best known. They have already been translated into several languages and are being translated into



Translator’s Introduction 33

several more, bringing Benveniste to a new global audience half a century after the lectures were given. The lectures were given on Mondays, on these dates:3

Chapter 1  Semiology • 2 December 1968: First Lecture (introduction to semiology) • 9 December 1968: Second Lecture (Peirce) • 16 December 1968: Third Lecture (Saussure, in contrast with Peirce) • 6 January 1969: Fourth Lecture (Saussure; non-linguistic sign systems and languages) • 13 January 1969: Fifth Lecture (relationship of interpretation between systems) • 20 January 1969: Sixth Lecture (languages as interpretant of other systems) • 27 January 1969: Seventh Lecture (how signification is organised in a language) These seven lectures on semiology begin by asking what the aim of a ‘general linguistics’ is, before moving on to the question of what it means to ‘signify’. ‘We live’, says Benveniste, ‘in a universe of signs’, making it all the harder to specify what signifying consists of. He turns to the two principal modern accounts of signifying, the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) and the semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), examining each in detail and drawing out their differences, which are focussed on how a language relates to other types of sign systems, such as traffic signals, but also music and art, and social systems as studied by ethnographers. Benveniste’s exposition builds to the conclusion that languages are so different from any other semiological system as to constitute a category apart. He argues that the difference hinges on ‘the relationship of interpretation . . . whether the semiological system under consideration can be self-interpreting or must receive its interpretation from another semiological system’. Languages alone represent the first, ‘auto-semiotising’ type; all other semiological systems must receive their interpretation from and through a language. As for the social, his view is

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stronger still: ‘The language c­ ontains the society . . . Only what the language denotes is social . . . The language is thus always the interpretant.’ Benveniste considers how semiological systems have come into being, and draws up a hierarchy between what he calls ‘autonomous’ and ‘dependent’ systems.

Chapter 2  Languages and Writing • 3 Feb. 1969: Eighth Lecture (writing as a semiotic system, and how it is acquired) • 10 Feb. 1969: Ninth Lecture (modes of writing based on things rather than words) • 17 Feb. 1969: Tenth Lecture (writing words: characters, cuneiform, hieroglyphs) • 24 Feb. 1969: Eleventh Lecture (syllabic and alphabetic writing) • 3 Mar. 1969: Twelfth Lecture (writing and the auto-semiotisation of the language) • 10 Mar. 1969: Thirteenth Lecture (Plato’s Philebus; the importance of limits) • 17 Mar. 1969: Fourteenth Lecture (writing in its denominations) • 24 Mar. 1969: Fifteenth Lecture (writing as the relay of speech) These eight lectures begin with Benveniste clearly detaching himself from the Saussurean position that writing is not language, merely a secondary representation of it. ‘We live in the civilisation of the book’, he says, which ‘puts the entirety of a language, speech and thinking itself, into an ever more intimate relation, a maximally intimate relation, with writing, such that the language can no longer be dissociated from its real or imagined inscription’. He goes into considerable detail on the effect that learning to read and write has on a child’s thinking process, and on the historical development of writing systems worldwide, including China, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Sumeria, Anatolia (Akkadian), Greek Linear B, Old Persian and the Semitic systems from which alphabetic writing derives. He considers the changes that occur in each case in the relationship between



Translator’s Introduction 35

the enunciation and its written representation. Each relationship is based on a different semiotics – and yet, in every case, ‘the writing system has always and everywhere been the instrument that has permitted a language to semiotise itself’. Having established this key proposition that writing is the instrument of the language’s ‘auto-semiotisation’, Benveniste undertakes a historical survey of how writing has been perceived, starting from what can be gleaned from the most ancient inscriptions, to Homer, the Bible, Plato and Aristotle and on to mediaeval and modern times. In the light of this investigation he then returns to the fundamental semiological questions posed in the previous chapter and the early lectures of this one, readdressing them now from the perspective of writing. This is the end of the course for the academic year 1968–9.

Chapter 3  Final Lecture, Final Notes • 1 December 1969: First (and final) Lecture of new course (and notes for planned next lecture) Benveniste begins the course for 1969–70 by saying that it will continue the study begun the previous year on the problems of meaning in language and the writing system. He introduces the difficulty that meaning posed for the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield (1887–1949), with his psychological and behaviourist commitments. Benveniste resumes and expands on the semiotic relationships of ‘engenderment’ and ‘interpretance’ posited in Chapter 1, adding to them a relationship of ‘homology’, when there is a term-for-term correspondence between two completely different systems. The lecture climaxes with a reconceived understanding of ‘semantics’ that was the central topic of the course – or rather, would have been, since five days later he suffered the stroke that left him paralysed and unable to speak for the rest of his life. Some brief notes he had prepared for the planned second lecture on 8 December are integrated into this chapter.

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Languages, Signification and Enunciation In France from the 1930s until the mid 1960s, Benveniste was a linguist’s linguist, producing work highly valued by IndoEuropeanists but little known to students in other areas of linguistics, let alone to the general public. This changed rather abruptly with the publication of twenty-eight of his papers as a book entitled Problèmes de linguistique générale (Problems in General Linguistics, Paris: Gallimard, 1966, hereafter PLG 1). From that point on his work was received as game-changing at a historical moment when many young French scholars in language and literature were turning their backs on traditional approaches and were eager for something revolutionary. For the first time since its posthumous publication in 1916, Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (Course in general linguistics) was being widely read, by an audience that was particularly receptive to it in the wake of the structuralism which had developed based on its principles. The great success of Tristes tropiques (1955) by the ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), followed by the large audience for work by Roland Barthes (1915–1980) and others writing in a structuralist vein, meant that most French readers knew Saussureanism before they knew Saussure. In the mid 1960s, Saussure’s Cours, Benveniste’s PLG 1 and work by Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) signalling the start of ‘post-structuralism’ were all circulating together, so that Saussure tended to be read anachronistically, through the lens of his successors, whilst Derrida was seen as anti-Saussurean, despite his attempts to explain that his position was much more complex than that. As for Benveniste and PLG 1, his positioning vis-à-vis Saussure and structuralism was to have his cake and eat it, not abandoning the Saussurean conception of a language as a system of pure differences in which everything connects with and supports everything else, but complementing it with the perspective of human action and interaction taken in the new linguistics of enunciation. Benveniste took it as read that Saussure had shown the way to understanding how a langue, a language system, is to be distinguished from parole, the spoken (or written or signed) output



Translator’s Introduction 37

produced using it. The aim now was to build on this in order to ‘surpass’ it, to add to Saussure’s vision rather than replace it. Saussure had already projected a linguistics of parole, in parallel with the linguistics of langue, which however he did not live long enough to work out. This was not quite what Benveniste aimed at, though in the same general direction. Parole is the product of using a language, whereas what Benveniste wanted to bring into the picture is the process – the difference being that the process involves both the product and the producers, the participants in the discourse. The process is what he termed énonciation ‘enunciation’, in a paper written in 1969 and published in 1970 which gained a wider audience when it was included in the second volume of Benveniste’s Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1974, henceforth PLG 2).4 PLG 2 gives no indication that its author was ailing in any way, nor does it mention the fact that the three articles with post1969 publication dates had all been written by that year. The introduction by Mohammad Djafar Moïnfar says that when he and Michel Lejeune (1907–2000) expressed to Benveniste their wish for a second volume, ‘he readily gave us his agreement, and authorised us to make a choice from amongst his recent articles (from 1965 to 1972) . . . These have been chosen and classified . . . under the strict surveillance of Émile Benveniste himself.’ Given that Benveniste was paralysed and unable to speak since his stroke in December 1969, this would be hard to believe were it not for Redard’s and Todorov’s independent testimony in the present volume to Benveniste’s continuing presence of mind and ability to indicate particular texts and even to spot errors in them. Benveniste’s initial presentation of his approach incorporates the question that arose in the minds of other structural linguists, as to whether enunciation, as use, was not what Saussure meant by parole, speech. He does not directly answer the question, but indicates how his focus is a different one. Enunciation is putting the language to work through an individual act of use.   But isn’t this manifestation of enunciation simply parole, the discourse which is produced each time one speaks? – We must take

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care to focus on the specific condition of enunciation: it is the act itself of producing an utterance, and not the text of the utterance, that is our object. This act is the fact of the speaker who mobilises the language on his or her own behalf. The relationship of the speaker to the language determines the linguistic features of the enunciation.5

The speaker is not ‘speaker’ before the act of enunciation. With enunciation, speaker becomes both speaker and subject; the enunciation positions him or her vis-à-vis the language, whilst at the same time that relationship shapes the enunciation. In presenting enunciation not as an alternative to structuralist analysis, but as a parallel track, the paper can be said to fulfil a wish expressed by the Neogrammarians Hermann Osthoff (1847–1909) and Karl Brugmann (1849–1919), when they remarked in 1878 that, in the past, ‘Languages were indeed investigated most eagerly, but people speaking, much too little.’6 But more striking is how far forward looking it is, anticipating ideas of decades later on stance, voice, identity, indexicality, in addition to the direct continuations of enunciation in the work of Antoine Culioli (1924–2018) and others in France. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1930–2002) conceptions of language and symbolic power are also grounded in Benveniste, and in fact it was Bourdieu who in 1969 coordinated the assembling and publication of perhaps Benveniste’s most influential book, the Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes.7 It provides the context for understanding what Benveniste means in the Last Lectures when he says that ‘the language contains the society’ (p. 84).8 When he traces the history of a social institution such as ‘personal loyalty’ back through each of the branches of the Indo-European language family, adducing precise etymological evidence to show the very different ways in which loyalty was conceived amongst Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Italo-Roman, Greek and Persian tribes and peoples, the conclusion seems inescapable that the institutional differences amongst them are historically bound to the language of their enunciation, so deeply as to be ‘contained’ not just in the sense of residing within, but in the strong sense of being prevented from escaping.



Translator’s Introduction 39

Normand traced the development of the enunciation approach in Benveniste’s work back to papers he published in 1946 and 1949, and notes in particular that his 1954 paper on current trends in linguistics, reprinted as the first item in PLG 1, defines a linguist’s three principal tasks as being to identify what is described using the word language (langue), how to describe this object (linguistic methodology), and third, to confront ‘the problem of signification’.9 Quoting Benveniste, ‘Language (langage) has as its function to say something. What exactly is this something in view of which language is articulated and how do we delimit it in relation to language itself? The problem of signification is posed.’10 Signification – essentially, meaning – is implicitly conceived here as lying outside the language system (langue), whilst being its raison d’être. As explained in the Editors’ Introduction (pp.  67–8), signification and enunciation occupy a ‘semantic’ realm, distinct from the ‘semiotic’ one of the language. Understanding the semantic is the linguist’s third task. The wording makes clear that signification lies outside language not just as a langue but as the more general langage as well, being the something that it is the ‘function’ of language and languages to say. The challenge is to identify and delimit meaning with relation to language, which is made difficult because language is itself articulated with this function in view. Who else was problematising meaning in this way at the time? A fair number of people, including Karl Bühler (1879–1963), Charles W. Morris (1901–1979) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). I would not however say that the same path was being followed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) or André Martinet (1908–1999), even though the latter two both used the word ‘functionalism’ to describe their different approaches. These four, and even the previous three named, worked with relatively traditional conceptions of linguistic meaning, when compared with behaviourists, who in linguistics were led by Bloomfield and his students. Their names are not usually raised in conjunction with Benveniste, with the exception of Zellig Harris (1909–1992) and his work on discourse analysis, a term which Harris is credited with originating. It

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is intriguing that Benveniste’s third task of 1954 can be read as an attempt at responding to the problematising of meaning that was at the heart of behaviourism, the same problem that motivated Bloomfield to de-psychologise his linguistics, though Benveniste attacks the problem with a different strategy. If it seems odd to link Benveniste’s enunciation project with English-language work, his definitive 1970 paper on enunciation identifies as its clearest predecessor a famous 1923 study by the Krakow-born anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski (1884– 1942), whose career was at the London School of Economics and later alongside Bloomfield at Yale.11 Indeed, Benveniste’s 1970 paper includes a full page of extracts from Malinowski (1923) in Benveniste’s French translation, printed in small font, and making Malinowski the author of about 18 per cent of Benveniste (1970).12 Benveniste’s use of the term énonciation appears to have been inspired by the use of the English word ‘utterance’ in the writings of Bloomfield, which figure significantly in Benveniste’s work right up through the Last Lectures, in Malinowski’s paper, and in work by the philosopher J. L. Austin (1911–1960).13 The insight particular to Benveniste is that the language system and the speaking person occupy different conceptual spheres that nevertheless intersect with one another. He explores this initially, and in greatest detail, in his papers on person and deixis. It is surprising and interesting that, in his review of PLG 1, Winfred P. Lehmann (1916–2007) categorised these papers as ‘psycholinguistics’.14 Equally surprising is Lehmann’s view that ‘If in any of his essays Benveniste discusses linguistic theory as such, it is in the first three, which treat the development of linguistics.’ In other words, for Lehmann, what Benveniste is doing is not linguistic theory at all, which is surprising to us now, and was a compliment from the pen of a non-Chomskyan American linguist like Lehmann in 1968.

Peirce and Saussure It is a coincidence, or perhaps not, that Benveniste’s first and most important papers on both Saussure and Peirce were produced for the first issues of new journals, Acta Linguistica



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in 1939,15 and Semiotica in 1969.16 The earlier paper is about Saussure only, and does not even mention Peirce. The later one, which derived from his opening address to the International Symposium of Semiotics at Warsaw in August 1968, deals with both Saussure and Peirce, contrasting their approach to signs in its first part, before laying out Benveniste’s own semiotic vision in the second. The Last Lectures build upon the Semiotica paper; in some respects the lectures are more detailed, in others, sketchier. They begin with Peirce and move to Saussure, presenting this movement as one from the more general to the more specific. But there is more to it than that. In terms of mediaeval warfare, it is a retreat from the bailey to the motte, from the field to the tower. Benveniste concludes that Peirce, the bailey in my metaphor, is not yet usable, because we have not yet sorted through his thought. So it is not obvious how to organise this mass of concepts, in which different orders cross, for example the word on a page, the word in itself, the different types of words, the words and not the language, so many varieties of signs. Objects of thinking, impressions, are also signs. That is why, out of all this, we have held on only to isolated denominations, but not an overall system. We are still in need of an in-depth study of Peirce’s symbolic thinking and theory of signs. Until then this will remain difficult to use. (p. 78 below)

From the start of the next lecture we are safely ensconced in Saussure, the motte, not so wide-ranging, but more defensible. Yet we have taken some of the Peircean bailey in with us, in the form of three key ideas: • the interpretant, in a general form • that signs generate signs • that the sign relationship has been oversimplified in Saussure on a simple associationist model, and needs to be complexified, perhaps along the lines of Peirce’s pragmaticist model. Benveniste makes clear that his own version of the interpretant, whatever it turns out to be, will not be Peirce’s. ‘The question I am asking is about the relation of interpretation between

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systems (entirely different from Peirce’s notion of interpretant)’ (p. 83). Peirce’s notions of interpretant, plural, might have been more apt, given that by 1906 he was writing about nine different types, based on combinations of emotional, energetic and logical interpretants with immediate, dynamical and final interpretants. I mentioned at the start of this section how it may not be coincidental that Benveniste’s articles of 1939 and 1969 appeared where they did. An invitation to contribute to the first issue of a new journal can feel to someone like Benveniste, with his instinctively pioneering mind, as both a licence and a demand to depart from the comfort zone of his usual sort of specialised study, and to do something a bit new. Neither article contains data, in the usual sense. Semiotica was being founded with the intention of bringing together the semiological tradition extending from Saussure with the semiotic one developed by Peirce and reinvigorated by Morris.17 The 1969 article frames Peirce and Saussure as polar opposites in its first half, allowing Benveniste’s own formulation of semiology in the second half to appear as a synthesis, without explicitly characterising it as such. It is clear that Benveniste knew Peirce from primary sources, and did not rely on summaries of his work by Morris or Jakobson or anyone else. He does not though give much indication of the variation found in Peirce’s expositions from across the many decades in which he revisited the subject. Neither the article nor his exposition of Peirce in the Second Lecture draws attention to how what Benveniste is presenting is a distillation from various drafts and letters, representing two quite distant phases of Peirce’s writing. The paragraph about pragmatism is from a paper of 1868,18 the relational triad passage from the long letter to Victoria Welby (1837–1912) of 1904.19 In the definition of thirdness, ‘(the object)’ and ‘(an interpretant)’ are Benveniste’s insertions, with a basis in other Peirce manuscripts of 1902 and 1903.20 Benveniste’s semiotics as laid out in the second half of the 1969 article and the lectures of late 1968 and early 1969 combines the systematicity of a langue as conceived by Saussure with the intersystematicity assumed by Peirce. ‘There is no trans-systematic sign’, Benveniste writes (PLG 2, p. 53); the



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value of each sign ‘is defined solely within the system which integrates it’, which is perfectly Saussurean. Nevertheless, every signifying system other than a language must be interpreted through a language. In the 1969 article: ‘Every semiology of a non-linguistic system must make use of a language to translate it; thus it can exist only through and in the semiology of a language, [. . .] which is the interpretant of all other systems, linguistic and non-linguistic’ (PLG 2, p. 60). And from the lectures: ‘It is the language as system of expression that is the interpretant of all institutions and of all culture’ (p. 87). One might argue that this core Benvenistean axiom is implicit in both Saussure and Peirce, but one senses that Peirce in particular might have resisted it. It reflects the way a linguist thinks, rather than a psychologist. The turn the lectures then take, which the article did not, is one Saussure would certainly have resisted. To say as I have done that Benveniste’s semiotics combines the systematicity of a langue as conceived by Saussure with the intersystematicity assumed by Peirce is potentially deceptive, because systematicity must be understood in a strong sense for Saussure, and in a weaker sense for Peirce, who places the stress on the inter-. Benveniste criticises Peirce for ‘mistaking’ words for being the whole of language. It is not words, not lexicon, not semantics or even syntax that is the foundation of structural linguistics, but phonology and morphology. And yet, when Saussure is teaching semiology, words are what he uses to exemplify the sign; he brings morphology into his discussion of the associative axis and relative motivation, but sounds hardly figure. Phonemes do not appear to be signs, just constituents of signifiers, even though the differences between phonemes are the ultimate source of signification, and that poses a puzzle: what differentiates a phoneme from a non-speech sound is some sort of signification that this is a signifying sound. This is where Peirce’s idea of ‘interpretance’ offers a valuable insight: that the very first meaning of every sign is: I am a sign. Interpret me. And even if Benveniste is right that Peirce only thinks about signification at the level of words, nothing in principle prevents us from extending this insight to the level of phonemes.

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Regarding his critique of Peirce for reducing languages to words, it is worth noting that Benveniste’s revered teacher Antoine Meillet (1866–1936) was widely known for his Latin etymological work, and that Benveniste himself had his broadest impact through his Vocabulaire des institutions indoeuropéennes, which is word-based. Its focus is on the semantic, and it can be seen as his major practical achievement in the linguistics of enunciation. Yet it shows on every page how deep understanding of the semantic requires detailed examination of the semiotic, and how such semantic understanding in turn is what allows us to weigh up alternative analyses of phonological and morphological facts in the semiotic system. Benveniste’s notes for the Twelfth Lecture underscore ‘the impossibility of reaching the semantic in language without passing through the semiotic plus the grammar’ (p. 107). Peirce tried to reach the semantic through words alone, without signs, without the language system. Saussure did not deny the self-evident link between the semiotic and the semantic, but observed methodological scruples whereby he, as a grammarian (the term he usually applied to himself), could only pronounce on the semiotic, the semantic being the realm of expertise of psychologists and philosophers. Saussure and Peirce stand in the Last Lectures as the key innovative thinkers of two orders of language and signification. With Peirce, Benveniste folds in the later phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and of the Husserlian linguist Hendrik Josephus Pos (1898–1955). Saussure stands at the head of the tradition of modern linguistics in which Benveniste himself was trained. For Benveniste, Peirce and phenomen- Saussure and structural  ology  linguistics represent the order represent the order  semantic  semiotic  intention/intended  signifier/signified  enunciation  language system  utterance  speech   words and things in the   signs and social structure   world



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Structural linguistics is based on the Saussurean order, which excludes consideration of writing. The new linguistics of enunciation envisioned by Benveniste would combine the two orders, and one of the main aims of the Last Lectures is to understand how they are bridged by writing.

Writing and Auto-semiotisation Benveniste’s Twelfth Lecture says: The auto-semiotisation of the language: the writing system has always and everywhere been the instrument that has permitted a language to semiotise itself [se sémiotiser]. This means that speakers stop on the language instead of stopping on the things enunciated [. . .]. (p. 106)

Auto-semiotisation is the most difficult of the concepts introduced in the Last Lectures. To begin with, it is not clear where the agency lies. The French reflexive construction se sémiotiser permits both the agentive reading ‘semiotise itself’ and the passive reading ‘be semiotised’. The prefix auto- seems to compel the reflexive reading ‘semiotise itself’, though when the next sentence says what ‘this means’, the agent is not the language, but the speakers, who ‘stop’ on it. Benveniste was not however centrally concerned with agency here, but with self-sufficiency: other semiotic systems require a language as their interpretant, but insofar as writing is the interpretant of a language, it is also part of the language, hence the ‘auto-’. But a language does not write itself; people write it, in acts of enunciation, starting with those in which the writing system is created. Here though we have a further agency conundrum, in that writing systems appear not to be independent of the structure of the language. And where the structures of languages have been brought into explicit awareness, culminating in the analysis which constitutes linguistics, writing has been the process through which this analysis has been done. This has taken place by people ‘stopping’ on the language, the structure, the s­emiotic, rather

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than their usual concern with ‘things enunciated’ for a semantic purpose in acts of enunciation. It is helpful at this point to go back to Benveniste’s 1954 paper on current trends in linguistics, where he said that ‘Language has as its function to say something. What exactly is this something in view of which language is articulated and how do we delimit it in relation to language itself? The problem of signification is posed’ (see above, p. 39). Addressing that problem is one of the linguist’s three principal tasks, along with identifying what is described using the word language (langue), and describing this object (linguistic methodology). These latter two are the analysis of what has resulted from the process of auto-semiotisation: making explicit the structure that speakers of the language ‘know’ intuitively, know without knowing. The structure already exists before writing and auto-semiotisation. There is not a point at which we find just enunciation, without a language. Pure vocal signifiance such as ‘natural’ cries are not yet enunciation. As soon as enunciation occurs, there is signification, which entails structure. Here again Benveniste’s view of ‘the impossibility of reaching the semantic in language without passing through the semiotic plus the grammar’ (p. 107) is relevant. Auto-semiotisation is then the creation not of semiosis, but of the capacity of language to be its own interpretant. In a sense, it is the creation of the semiosis of semiosis itself. That is what writing makes possible – and then, once it has done so, this second level of semiosis becomes so dominant in our understanding of language that we lose sight of the original level of enunciation entirely. This, for Benveniste, is the original sin of linguistics, and of structuralism in particular – a sin he himself is stained with, and from which he is struggling in his last years to redeem himself and the rest of us. He goes on to explain what happens when speakers ‘stop on the language’: ‘they take the language into consideration and discover it signifying; they notice recurrences, identities, partial differences, and these observations get fixed in graphic representations which objectivise the language and summon as images the language’s very materiality’ (p. 106). The word ‘materiality’ has been chosen with care, navigating as it does through the position taken in



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the Cours de linguistique générale that ‘a language is a form, not a substance’.21 But it is not obvious what Benveniste meant by ‘the language’s very materiality’ here. Of course, once we are in the realm of graphic representations, we are in that part of the Saussurean map which says simply ‘Here be monsters.’22 Benveniste is steering past the Scylla of Saussure – but heading straight for the Charybdis of Derrida.23 One of Derrida’s central points concerning spoken and written language is that, before writing, there was no ‘spoken language’, something which could only be conceived after writing was invented. This is consonant with Benveniste’s picture of a pre-writing world of pure enunciation. The two diverge however as soon as Benveniste gives his ‘Fundamental principle of writing: Initially, one wants to transmit or save a message’ (p. 107). Derrida shows how, before writing, hence before the speech–language dichotomy, languages already had the essential features which modern linguists regularly ascribe to the written side of the speech–writing divide, notably distribution across space and endurance through time. If these characteristics depended upon writing, the Homeric epics would not have been possible, nor the Bible, which begins with two different accounts of creation apparently derived from two distinct oral traditions. Research into modern oral traditions carried out in the twentieth century has testified that oral transmission is capable of at least as much reproductive fidelity as is writing (which is itself far from perfect in this respect). If we transpose Benveniste’s statements about writing into statements about what Derrida called ‘arche-writing’ – in effect, language as it was before the invention of writing in the usual sense, when it was nevertheless already ‘written’ in the sense of being ‘inscribed’ in speakers’ minds, brains, neurons – then the problems disappear.24 How writing could have been conceived or imagined prior to speakers’ ‘notic[ing] recurrences, identities, partial differences’ ceases to be a conundrum. And we can legitimately leave aside all the questions that Benveniste ought to have raised concerning who the ‘speakers’ are that he is talking about – just literate speakers, who historically, until recently, have constituted a tiny minority of the speakers of any language? It is true that the practitioners of linguistics

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have all come from that minority, but the auto-semiotisation of language is not limited to us. Is it? The questions I am posing arise from the scale of Benveniste’s enquiry, which is the grand historical scale. It reaches as far back as to consider the effects of different types of writing systems – alphabetic, syllabic, Chinese characters, etc. – on auto-semiotisation. And it is continuous with his linguistic archaeology of institutions, and the conclusion drawn from it that the language contains the society. If he had continued his lectures, he might have gone on to examine the question on the scale of literate and non-literate societies, or of individuals, which would constitute a different enquiry. He would no doubt have left us more clues as to what to do about the limits of literacy and the relationship of writing to auto-semiotisation. He might have talked about how his approach did or did not articulate with Derrida’s, whose Of Grammatology we know that he read, since his manuscripts include notes taken during his reading of it. Irène Fenoglio explains his silence by Benveniste’s desire to treat the subject as a linguist, hence ignoring someone he regarded as a philosopher – which is entirely plausible, and in line with what we know about the operation of disciplinary boundaries at the time.25 Derrida always spoke of how much Benveniste’s etymological enquiries enriched his thinking, and his writings show that it is so. Here was a lost opportunity to repay the debt. Insofar as the marginalisation of writing is an aspect of structuralism, Benveniste’s last lectures pass unhesitatingly beyond it. The fundamentally philological nature of his etymological writings make him pre-structuralist, though in his explanations of the history of individual words the spirit and basic approach of structural method come through. And if the central roles he accords to writing and enunciation make him a post-structuralist, that is certainly not a flag he wanted to wave. Benveniste strove to reconcile his vision of the future path of linguistics with its present and past. Or, more precisely, its pasts.



Translator’s Introduction 49

Difficulties of Translation Translating a text like the Last Lectures requires a balance between making readers aware of ambiguities and precisions, and not putting readers off with a translation in which these issues are omnipresent. Most readers, most good readers, want the main ideas without constant interruption over details. It is a utopian task, and simultaneously dystopian, since the end product is guaranteed to let every reader down in one way or another. The problems of translation fall into three groups, depending on whether they apply to all scientific work, or just linguistics, or are specific to Benveniste and the Last Lectures. Regarding the first, there is a widespread belief that one must translate each key scientific term in the original text by one same targetlanguage term, with complete consistency. This one-to-one correspondence principle represents an ideal that can never be wholly reached, because each language, as a system of linguistic signs, embodies a different conceptualisation of how things, events, states, relations are divided and classified. This is in fact the starting point of Saussurean semiology: that the world is not given to us divided up in advance, with languages as nomenclatures for pre-linguistic divisions and classifications. Rather, the creation of each linguistic sign is the simultaneous creation of a concept and a sound pattern for denoting it. One of Saussure’s famous French examples is mouton, which corresponds to English ‘sheep’ but also to ‘mutton’, English having two different words for the animal on the hoof and the consumable meat of the animal, where French uses the same word for both. A French treatise on sheep butchery is going to use mouton throughout, but the English translator will have to switch from ‘sheep’ to ‘mutton’ between the section of the treatise when the mouton arrives at the abattoir and the one where the mouton is cut and trimmed. ‘Semantic fields’ are constituted differently from language to language, and although this may be less the case with technical terms – scientific jargon – developed in the context of international journals and conferences, no high fence keeps vernacular and scientific terms neatly separated.

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A more complex example is that of French langue and English ‘tongue’ in a treatise on phonetics. Both words mean both an organ of the body and a ‘language’. French langue, which has other ambiguities discussed below, is however the usual word for a language in both scientific and non-scientific discourse, whereas the use of English ‘tongue’ for language is a bit archaic (though not impossible) in a scientific context. If translators of French phonetics texts applied the one-to-one correspondence rule, and rendered every occurrence of langue as ‘tongue’, including when it refers to a language, they would clearly do their readers a disservice; the different distribution of ‘tongue’ and ‘language’ in English inclines an English-language reader to make different interpretative choices for ‘tongue’ than a French-language reader makes for langue, and translators need to take this into account. The word langue takes us into the second grouping, that of translation difficulties particular to linguistics. Saussure famously grappled with the problem and opportunity offered by the pair of French words langue and langage (with counterparts in other Romance languages: Italian lingua–linguaggio, Spanish lengua–lenguaje, etc.), both roughly corresponding to ‘language’, along with parole, which means ‘word’ and ‘speech’, but is also sometimes used as a synonym of langue or langage. Saussure’s Cours succeeded in instituting a clear distinction between langue and parole within structural linguistics, such that langue designates a socially shared language system like French or English, and parole is what an individual produces using that system, such as Benveniste’s lectures or the present paragraph. Less clear is what langage designates in his system; when he speaks of the faculté de langage, the language faculty that people have, it refers to language as a general human phenomenon. Some diagrams he drew suggest that langage is the combined totality of langue and parole – and here the great remaining problem of langue raises its head, because if it is a component of a ‘universal’ faculty of langage, it is not so in its status as a particular system like French or English, but as a universal conception that embraces all such particular systems – at which point its distinctiveness from langage becomes less clear.



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In the present translation, langue meaning a particular system will be ‘a’ or ‘the’ language, or in the plural – ‘Inuktitut is not a language I know. It is the language of the Inuit, and one of the Na-Dene languages.’ When ‘language’ occurs without an article, it translates French langage, and means the universal concept: ‘Language is a human endowment.’ This least bad solution is inspired by Roy Harris’s (1931– 2015) practice in his translations of Saussure.26 It is not ideal, because it requires using ‘a language’ or ‘the language’ for la langue in many passages which would sound more idiomatic in English with just ‘language’, but where that would create ambiguity with langage. The stylistic awkwardness is the price paid for what is here a crucial distinction, and is preferable to the alternative of using the French words, langue and langage, in the English version, which defeats the whole purpose of translation, and should be a last resort, for when no English word captures the core nuance of the French, or when the French is generally known to English readers (e.g. raison d’être, whereas langue will be familiar to a much more restricted subset of readers). Of the problems which are specifically Benvenistean, the thorniest are those which involve sens, signification and signifiance. Corresponding to sens are numerous English words, including ‘meaning’, ‘direction’, ‘sense’ in the meaning of one of the five physical senses, or of mental capacity, or a vague intuition, and this is only a partial list. When we speak of the ‘sense of a word’, we may be referring to its basic meaning, but more often to a nuance, ‘in the strict sense’, ‘in a legal sense’, ‘in an idiosyncratic sense’, ‘in the American sense’, etc. We can say that an utterance ‘makes no sense’. But for the basic sens of a word or sentence, we tend to say ‘meaning’. When in the First Lecture Benveniste says concerning linguistique générale (general linguistics), C’est une notion qu’on entend en sens divers, ‘sense’ is a good choice: ‘This notion is understood in various senses.’ A bit later, Benveniste says that the verb signifier, for us and in this context, means avoir un sens, représenter. To translate avoir un sens by ‘have a sense’ would read much less clearly than ‘have a meaning’. Most of the time I translate sens by ‘meaning’, sometimes by ‘sense’, occasionally by ‘way’ or by another of its meanings.

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Returning to the start of the First Lecture, Benveniste here introduces the term signifiance, which also appears in his 1969 Semiotica article. The Editor’s Introduction by Coquet and Fenoglio considers this to be a key term of the Last Lectures, which makes translating it a delicate and crucial business. The Robert dictionary of French restricts signifiance to the specialised terminology of linguistics. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the word ‘signifiance’ as having existed in Middle English, as a borrowing from Anglo-Norman, but obsolete since the early seventeenth century. Its definition is given as ‘Significance, meaning; interpretation; augury, foreshadowing. Also: a sign or expression.’ The OED does not mention the use of the word in certain manuscript fragments by Peirce, in wholly idiosyncratic senses, and not exactly in the sense of Benveniste’s signifiance. It is tempting to find another English word, such as ‘signification’ or ‘meaningfulness’, and explain in a note which aspects of signifiance have been lost or camouflaged. But ‘meaningfulness’ will not work because of how Benveniste associates meaning with enunciation, whereas signifiance appears to apply to the whole of language. And ‘signification’ is blocked by a passage from the Seventh Lecture in which Benveniste uses signifiance alongside signification: Système de la langue: les unités sont isolables, constantes et porteuses de signification. Par nature, c’est une totalité complète, autonome. Elle est formée de signes dont chacun a sa valeur de signifiance. Language system: the units are isolable, constant and significationbearing. By its nature, this is a complete, autonomous totality. It is formed of signs, each of which has its signifiance value.

It is not immediately clear from this passage whether the two terms are being contrasted or are intended as synonymous, but it was Benveniste’s practice to introduce a linguistic innovation such as the word signifiance only when necessary, not just for stylistic variety. Like Saussure before him, until the end of his career he recognised that linguistic innovations make for disruptive listening and reading. Sometimes we want to disrupt



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our readers, in order to shake them out of fixed ideas that they assume to be common sense; and on some of these occasions all attempts to adapt existing words of the language to new concepts end up failing. This was the case with Saussure’s efforts over many years to talk about the component parts of the linguistic sign: calling them ‘auditory image’ and ‘concept’ led to misunderstanding of them as being essentially visual in nature and self-standing, blocking his transmission of the essential point that they are purely ‘values’ generated by difference from other such components within the system. Only in one of his very last lectures on general linguistics in May 1911 did he give in and introduce the neologisms signifiant ‘signifier’ and signifié ‘signified’, which by virtue of their discomfiting novelty at least did not carry the baggage of idées fixes. Perhaps it has something to do with an impatience that comes with age. Saussure did this near the end of his life, and Benveniste too was well into his sixties before neologistic usages began to characterise his work with some frequency. Innovating the French word signifiance was such a blatantly disruptive terminological move that the translation should capture some of this disruption. I have opted therefore to use ‘signifiance’, as an old English word revived with a new meaning, and pronounced sig-ni-FY-ance, like ‘defiance’. The fact that ‘signifiance’ has been obsolete in English for centuries makes this an easier case than that of ‘enunciation’ as a translation of Benveniste’s énonciation. As indicated in an earlier section, énonciation appears to enter Benveniste’s lexicon as a translation of ‘utterance’ as used by Bloomfield and other Anglophone linguists as well by Malinowski and Austin. The word ‘utterance’ was in the process of a long-term semantic shift from being a verbal noun, denoting the action of speaking, to denoting the product of the action of speaking. That at least is the case for its usage in linguistics, where an utterance is, as Zellig Harris defined it in 1951, ‘any stretch of talk, by one person, before and after which there is silence on the part of the person’.27 The OED gives this example under the heading ‘5b. Frequently in Linguistics, spoken or written words forming the complete expression of a thought. (Used with varying degrees of technicality.)’ Earlier in the hierarchy of definitions

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of ‘­utterance’ the OED gives ‘The action of uttering with the voice; vocal expression of something; speaking, speech’, in other words the process rather than the product, with examples from the fifteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, though not later. Native speakers of English who are not professional linguists whom I have asked to define ‘utterance’ give the meaning which the OED says is a special use in linguistics, and do not accept the verbal sense, which I take as evidence of the word’s semantic shift. Malinowski’s 1923 paper contains thirty-five occurrences of ‘utterance’, most of them in the later-developing sense of what is uttered – this despite the fact that the paper’s main aim is to establish the central importance of ‘utterance’ in the earlier sense of the act of uttering.28 Bloomfield’s uses of ‘utterance’ likewise vary between the two senses, and are often ambiguous between them. The same ambiguity is found in Austin, whom Benveniste cites in a French version in which ‘utterance’ is translated not as énonciation, but énoncé, which means unambiguously the text produced rather than the act of speaking. Benveniste’s discussion of Austin does however use énonciation alongside énoncé, without making a clear-cut distinction between them.29 If Benveniste also looked up ‘enunciation’ in the OED, he found it defined first as ‘The action of giving definite expression to (a law, principle, etc.)’, ‘The action of declaring or asserting (a fact, doctrine, etc.)’, with examples from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries; and only later in its current meaning, ‘The uttering or pronouncing of articulate sounds; manner of utterance.’ Enunciation in English means speaking the language not in the usual way but ‘as it is written’, with an exaggerated differentiation of consonants and vowels which are not generally differentiated in the spoken language, particularly in unstressed syllables (for example, pronouncing ‘Christian’ as /'krIs ti ən/ rather than as /’krIs ʧən/). In French it is possible to articulate more or less ‘clearly’, but the gap between how sounds are written and pronounced is not so great, largely because French is a syllable-timed rather than a stress-timed language, and unstressed vowels are not reduced to schwa as in English. The translator is left with the unsatisfactory options of rendering énonciation either as ‘enunciation’, with the risk of its



Translator’s Introduction 55

being read in its usual sense of careful elocution, or as ‘utterance’, the term which Benveniste himself was translating, but which present-day readers will understand, initially at least, as spoken or written output rather than the process of speaking or writing. As ‘enunciation’ has already been established in the (admittedly scant) English-language literature dealing with this aspect of Benveniste’s work, I have chosen to stick with it for énonciation, and to translate énoncé as ‘utterance’. Benveniste himself says that ‘We can transpose the semantism of one language into that of another, “salva veritate” [with the truth preserved]; this is the possibility of translation; but we cannot transpose the semiotism of one language into another, this is the impossibility of translation.’30 The second half of the sentence is unarguably true. To the first half a proviso must be added: to do such semantic transposition is a less complex task when translating one’s own intended meaning than it is when translating someone else’s text. In the latter case, all that I can translate is my reading of the text, which is to say my interpretation of its ‘semantism’, based on its ‘semiotism’. I must suspend disbelief in the gap between Benveniste’s semantism and my reading of him. Pace Benveniste, transposing the semantism of one language into that of another is a utopian undertaking when it is someone else’s enunciations being translated. To call it utopian is as much as to say that it too is impossible, as was affirmed by José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955), who added that it is very important to emphasize that everything – that is, everything worthwhile, everything truly human – is difficult, very difficult; so much so, that it is impossible. As you see, it is not an argument against the possible splendour of the task of translating to declare its impossibility. On the contrary, this is what elevates it to the most sublime rank and lets us infer that it has meaning.31

* I am grateful to Irène Fenoglio and Jean-Claude Coquet for the answers they have patiently provided to my many queries; to Edinburgh University Press and its linguistics editor, Laura Williamson, for their steady support; to the École Normale Supérieure in the rue d’Ulm for inviting me to present a series of

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lectures in December 2017 on Benveniste, his last lectures and problems in translating them, and to those who attended and took part in discussions which helped to guide me in some of my translation choices. My apologies to readers who may find some of those choices not to be the ones they would have preferred. I have spent long nights with my sleepless mind troubled by language and languages, sense, signifiance, interpretance, auto-semiotisation and other strange hairy utterances wrestling one another, with, in the ring as referee, the ghost of Émile Benveniste, whose life must have been full of such enunciationhaunted dreams.

Notes   1 Émile Benveniste, ‘La notion de “rythme” dans son expression linguistique’ (The notion of ‘rhythm’ in its linguistic expression), Journal de Psychologie 44 (1951), 401–10, repr. in Problèmes de linguistique générale, vol. 1 (PLG 1, Paris: Gallimard, 1966), pp.  327–35. An English version of PLG 1 was published as Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971).  2 See especially Henri Meschonnic, Critique du rythme: anthropologie historique du langage (Critique of rhythm: Historical anthropology of language, Lagrasse: Verdier, 1982), and The Henri Meschonnic Reader: A Poetics of Society, ed. Marko Pajević, trans. Pier-Pascale Boulanger, Andrew Eastman, John E. Joseph, David Nowell Smith, Marko Pajević and Chantal Wright (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). On Meschonnic and Benveniste, see John E. Joseph, ‘Language-body continuity in the linguistics-semiology-poetics-traductology of Henri Meschonnic’, Comparative Critical Studies, 15/3 (2018), 311–29.   3 The chapter headings are by the editors Coquet and Fenoglio; the topics in parentheses are mine.  4 Benveniste, ‘L’appareil formel de l’énonciation’ (The formal apparatus of enunciation), Langages 5/17 (1970), 12–18, repr. in PLG 2, pp. 79–88. Although an English version of PLG 2 has yet to appear, a partial translation of this paper has been published in The Discourse Studies Reader: Main Currents in Theory and Analysis, ed. Johannes Angermuller, Dominique Maingueneau



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and Ruth Wodak (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2014). For a fuller history of énonciation in Benveniste’s work see Aya Ono, La notion d’énonciation chez Émile Benveniste (Limoges: Lambert-Lucas, 2007).   5 ‘L’appareil formel de l’énonciation’, PLG 2, p. 80.  6 Karl Osthoff and Karl Brugmann, Preface to Morphologische Untersuchungen auf dem Gebiete der indogermanischen Sprachen, vol. 1 (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1878), pp. iii–xx, p. iii.  7 Benveniste, Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, 2 vols (Paris: Minuit, 1969; English version, Dictionary of IndoEuropean Concepts and Society, trans. Elizabeth Palmer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016; trans. first published as IndoEuropean Language and Society, Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1973).   8 This is also stated in Benveniste, ‘Structure de la langue et structure de la société’ (Structure of the language and structure of the society), Linguaggi nella società e nella tecnica (Congresso Internazionale Olivetti, Milano, 14–17 ottobre 1968) (Milano: Edizioni di Comunità, 1970), pp. 459–60, repr. in PLG 2, pp. 91–102, p. 95. He adds that ‘the language includes the society, but is not included by it’ (p. 96).   9 Claudine Normand, ‘Les termes de l’énonciation de Benveniste’, Histoire-Épistémologie-Langage 8/2 (1986), 191–206, referring to Benveniste’s ‘Structures des relations de personne dans le verbe’ (Structures of person relationships in the verb, Bulletin de la Société de linguistique de Paris 43/1, 1946, repr. in PLG 1, pp. 225–36), ‘Le système sublogique des prépositions en latin’ (The sublogical system of Latin prepositions, Travaux de Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague 5: Recherches structurales, 1949, repr. in PLG 1, pp. 132–9) and ‘Tendances récentes en Linguistique générale’ (Recent trends in general linguistics, Journal de Psychologie, 1954, 47–51, repr. in PLG 1, pp. 3–17). 10 Benveniste, ‘Tendances récentes’, PLG 1, p. 7. 11 Bronisław Malinowski, ‘The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages’, supplement to C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1923), pp. 451–510.

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12 This estimate is based on a word count of two segments of the paper of equal size, one in small font and the other in large, which shows that the former contains 65 per cent more words than the latter. The only other works cited are by Grace de Laguna (1878– 1978), again in English (Speech: Its Function and Development, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1927, p. 244n.), and Jakobson (Essais de linguistique générale, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Nicolas Ruwet, Paris: Minuit, 1963, p. 217), with Benveniste referring just to a specific point in each, in his article’s closing footnote. 13 In particular J. L. Austin, ‘Performatif-constatif’, in La philosophie analytique, Cahiers de Royaumont (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1962), pp. 271–304. An English version, ‘PerformativeConstative’, trans. G. J. Warnock, appeared in Philosophy and Ordinary Language, ed. Charles E. Caton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963), pp. 22–54. See Benveniste, ‘La philosophie analytique et le langage’ (Analytical philosophy and language), Les études philosophiques 18/1 (jan.–fév. 1963), 3–11, repr. in PLG 1, pp. 267–76, and John E. Joseph, ‘“Énonciation” en anglais: Émile Benveniste et la (re)traduction d’une utterance ambigüe’, in Traduire la linguistique, traduire les linguistes, ed. Giuseppe d’Ottavi and Valentina Chepiga (Louvain-la-Neuve: Academia, in press). There are also possible links to Charles Bally’s théorie de l’énonciation in his Linguistique générale et linguistique française (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1932), and to the critique of Bally by Édouard Pichon (Les principes de la suffixation en Français, Paris: d’Artrey, 1942). Whereas Bally treats enunciation as produced by the language structure, Pichon foreshadows Benveniste in relocating it to the speaker. Lacan’s references to l’énonciation in his Seminar of 1958 reflect his reading of and personal ties to both Pichon and Benveniste. 14 Winfred P. Lehmann, review of PLG 1, Language 44/1 (1968), 91–6. 15 Benveniste, ‘Nature du signe linguistique’ (Nature of the linguistic sign), Acta Linguistica 1/1 (1939), 23–9, repr. in PLG 1, pp. 49–55. 16 Benveniste, ‘Sémiologie de la langue’ (Semiology of the language), Semiotica 1 (1969), 1–12, 127–35, repr. in PLG 2, pp. 43–66. 17 This began with Morris’s Foundations of the Theory of Signs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938) and continued with



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his Signs, Language and Behavior (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1946), then latterly with Signification and Significance: A Study of the Relations of Signs and Values (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), the only work by Morris cited directly by Benveniste, in the 1969 paper (PLG 2, p. 57n.). 18 Pp. 76–7 below, adapted by Benveniste from Peirce, ‘Some consequences of four incapacities’, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 2 (1868), 140–57, repr. in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 5: Pragmatism and Pragmaticism, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), pp. 264–317. 19 P. 77 below, adapted from Peirce, Letters to Lady Welby (1904), Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 8: Reviews, Correspondence, and Bibliography, ed. Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 328. 20 E.g. in CSP’s Lowell Lectures of 1903 Second Draught of 3rd Lecture on Some Topics of Logic Bearing on Questions Now Vexed, Harvard Houghton Library, no. 462 in Richard S. Robin, Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce ([Amherst]: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967), pp. 84–6. 21 Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, with the assistance of Albert Riedlinger, 2nd edn (Paris: Payot, 1922), pp. 157, 169. 22 Saussure described the effect of writing on language as ‘teratological’ (ibid., p. 54). 23 Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967; English version, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 2nd edn, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) and L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967; English version, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 24 Julia Kristeva speaks of Benveniste’s treatment of writing in the Last Lectures ‘joining’ Derrida’s concept of the arche-trace, in ‘La linguistique, l’universel et “le pauvre linguiste”’, in Irène Fenoglio, Jean-Claude Coquet, Julia Kristeva, Charles Malamoud and Pascal Quignard, Autour d’Émile Benveniste (Paris: Seuil, 2016), pp. 97–151, pp. 115–16. 25 Irène Fenoglio, ‘L’écriture au fondement d’une “civilisation ‘laïque”’, in Autour d’Émile Benveniste, pp. 153–236. Derrida’s

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“Le supplément de copule: La philosophie devant la linguistique”, Langages 24 (1971), 14–39 (revised version in Derrida, Marges de la philosophie, Paris: Minuit, 1972; English version, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), a contribution to a special issue organised by Kristeva to honour Benveniste, was widely perceived as an attack on Benveniste’s attempt to explain Aristotle’s categories through a linguistic analysis. See also John E. Joseph, ‘L’hostipitalité des linguistes: Puech coincé entre Benveniste et Derrida’, in Héritages, réceptions, écoles en sciences du langage: Avant et après Saussure, ed. Valentina  Bisconti, Anamaria  Curea and Rossana De Angelis (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2019). 26 See John E. Joseph, ‘Harris’s Saussure – Harris as Saussure: The translations of the Cours and the Third Course’, Language Sciences 33 (2011), 524–30. I do not follow Harris’s practice exactly, but have taken inspiration from it on this point. 27 Zellig S. Harris, Methods in Structural Linguistics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 14. 28 Malinowski’s mother tongue was Polish, but the paper contains no indications of interlinguistic influence. 29 Ono, La notion d’énonciation chez Émile Benveniste, pp. 27–57, shows how in Benveniste’s own work, from 1945 until his definitive formulations of the concept in the 1969 and 1970 papers, the sense of énonciation is often ambiguous, or indeed sometimes quite clearly means what he will eventually call énoncé. See also Jean-Claude Coquet, ‘Linguistique et sémiologie’, Actes sémiotiques–Documents IX/88 (1987), 5–20. 30 ‘La forme et le sens dans le langage’ (Form and meaning in language), in Le langage II: Sociétés de Philosophie de langue française, Actes du XIIIe Congrès, Genève, 1966 (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1967), pp. 29–40, repr. in PLG 2, pp. 215–38, p. 228. 31 José Ortega y Gasset, ‘La miseria y el esplendor de la traducción’ (The poverty and splendour of translation), La Nación (Buenos Aires), May–June 1937, pp. 53–4 (my translation).

Editors’ Introduction Jean-Claude Coquet and Irène Fenoglio

Each time the history of the world takes an important step forward and crosses a difficult pass, a reinforcing formation of horses advances: bachelors, solitary men, who live only for an idea. Citation of Kierkegaard copied by Benveniste and found amongst this papers1

Émile Benveniste Now Decades after his death, the work of Émile Benveniste continues to be cited in much research in linguistics and beyond. It is particularly in the field of research on énonciation, ‘enunciation’, that his work has occupied a founding role, since the 1970s. In the areas of discourse analysis, text linguistics, pragmatics, semantics, conversation analysis . . ., it constitutes, for French research, a reclaimed heritage. Less well known is the considerable work of the comparativist, which is however what gained him entry into the Collège de France. Benveniste is part of an uninterrupted line of major figures of French linguistics and its institutions, since its renewal in the last third of the nineteenth century. Amongst the figures: Michel Bréal, Gaston Paris, Antoine Meillet, Joseph Vendryes, Marcel Cohen . . . Amongst the institutions, the Collège de France, the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), the Société de linguistique de Paris. Seen from abroad, the reception of Benveniste’s work, and notably the theory of enunciation, remains one of contrast. In a certain number of countries, Brazil and Russia for example, the translation of the Problèmes de linguistique générale (PLG) has given rise to an original line of linguistic 61

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work taking inspiration from it. In the rest of the world, the possibilities which the translations offer are still to be realised. The publication of the PLG (Paris: Gallimard, vol. 1 1966, vol. 2 1974), following a plan approved by the author for the first volume, and reprised identically for the second, assured delayed but widespread publicity for Benveniste’s major works, but also limited the profile of his other works, less accessible in every sense. Those bearing on little-studied languages are accessible only to specialists. But also left in the shadows have been the lecture courses given by Benveniste at the EPHE and the Collège de France. These have never been published. We believe it is important to offer readers the courses that he professed and in particular those which were innovative with regard to the articles published in the PLG. This is the case with his last lectures, in which Benveniste develops a theme often announced in the articles on general linguistics and never treated directly, that of writing.

Unpublished manuscripts This anthropologist of language, well versed in the ancient IndoEuropean languages, even very ancient or little-known ones (Tocharian, Hittite, Old Persian, Avestan, Ossetian, Sogdian, etc.), specialist in comparative grammar and innovating theoretician of general linguistics, bequeathed all his papers to the Bibliothèque Nationale (now the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, or BnF). The project of this edition rests on the opportunity provided by an archive ‘dormant’ for thirty years. In fact, this archive of the BnF, of capital importance for the history of linguistic theories, had not yet been used before the 2000s.2 The publication of these last lectures offers an occasion for exhibiting the least known of the linguist’s different facets: we know the scholar’s reach, we admire the clarity of the theoretical style of the author of the PLG, we are beginning to glimpse the researcher’s dimensions and orientations, but we had forgotten the teacher’s dynamism and solidity. Now, if the scholar discovers and develops an ever more detailed knowledge of specific linguistic spaces, if the researcher constructs, article after



Editors’ Introduction 63

article, his theory and the concepts which underlie it, its didactic deployment for transmitting it resourcefully had not yet been revealed, even though several people who were in the audience of Benveniste’s lectures bore witness to it. This edition of Benveniste’s last lectures in the Collège de France contributes to his unveiling by bringing to light the linguist’s final reflections. These reflections have remained unpublished. Of course, we shall see the same movement of thinking that animates the article ‘Semiology of Language’ which Benveniste completed and published in these same years 1968 and 1969, but we see developing before our eyes an entire history of and reflection on writing that we cannot read in any of the linguist’s publications, though his interest in writing is stated repeatedly.3

1968–9: A Period of Intense Activity These two years precede the very long period of immobility and silence due to aphasia before Benveniste’s death in 1976. The last lectures he gives during these years, in the Collège de France, are underpinned by intense activity. All the genres of his research and writing are present simultaneously: the theoretician writes and publishes ‘Sémiologie de la langue’, an article in which he makes explicit the cardinal concept of the dyad ‘semiotic/semantic’; the researcher pursues theoretical elucidations of his conception of meaning in language and presents them to the Semiotic Symposium held in Warsaw; he accepts, in 1969, to be the first President of the International Association for Semiotic Studies which he helped to create, and also accepts the presidency of the Cercle de sémiotique de Paris (Paris Semiotic Circle) the same year.4 Finally, the professor’s lectures transmit his scholarly discoveries and newly opened research paths, such as the problematics of writing, where the results were not yet stabilised in an article. It is worth focussing for a moment on the International Symposium of Semiotics of Warsaw, so great was the mark it made on this period. In the year 1968, when the Semiotic Symposium was taking place in Warsaw, from 25 August to 1 September, the political

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situation in Eastern Europe was dramatic. Although figuring on the programme, neither Algirdas Julien Greimas, of Lithuanian origin, nor Roman Jakobson, of Russian origin, nor Thomas A. Sebeok, of Hungarian origin, to cite only internationally renowned invited linguists, was willing to risk the voyage. With good reason. One recalls that the ‘Prague Spring’ concluded with the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops on 21 August. But, in Warsaw on the 25th, nothing seemed to have changed. ‘Peace’ reigned. The participants – including Benveniste, who opened the symposium and led the French delegation – kept to the announced titles of their talks, as if the scientific stakes had to prevail. According to the programme, Benveniste’s paper was entitled ‘La distinction entre la sémiotique et la sémantique’ (The distinction between semiotics and semantics). In fact, Benveniste had noted that he would speak in his opening address about the ‘distinction between the semiotic [le sémiotique] and the semantic [le sémantique]’. His shift to the masculine, apparently taken to be a typo and ‘corrected’ by the symposium secretariat, would have sufficed to alert the attentive audience member that Benveniste intended to open up a new field. His research did not imply a break with Saussure, but a revival of his questioning, reformulated by Benveniste in his preparatory notes in the form: ‘How does a language signify?’,5 with the hope of supplying some elements toward a solution. By underlining the question Benveniste marks his insistence that this was ‘Saussure’s problem, the one which obsessed him all his life and informs all his linguistics’. One may well imagine that it was a major challenge for Benveniste as well. Referring to the semiotic alone was not the right answer. It was necessary ‘to show the irreducible nature of the sentence’, as he had already stated, he writes, at Cambridge in 1962, and to bring to light the specificity of discourse vis-à-vis the language system.

The sign and the word Semiology, according to Benveniste, must have two axes, the semiotic and the semantic, ‘the interest of this distinction’ being to ‘permit passing beyond the Saussurean theory’. In effect, to



Editors’ Introduction 65

stick to the Saussurean notion of the sign is to remain in the domain of the semiotic. Language is reduced to its constituent elements provided with ‘signifiance’ (Benveniste puts the term in quotation marks and refers to an article by the linguist Frédéric Paulhan, father of the writer and literary critic Jean Paulhan), but ‘one bars the way to accessing the language in practice’, the domain proper to the semantic. It is at this level that Benveniste decides to situate himself. The semantic has its properties that linguists fail to recognise. For example, ‘the constitutive principle of “meaning” and of the semantic is the principle of discursive succession [consécution discursive]’, of linearity. ‘Meaning is produced by putting into succession the constituents that are words.’ As per his usual thinking habits, Benveniste opposes, in binary fashion, the ‘words’ of the semantic (his own domain) to the Saussurean ‘signs’ of the semiotic: ‘Saussure remained in this fundamentally static conception of the “sign” as unit, because he was quite rightly seeking the first elements of a language.’ In this perspective, ‘the notion of the linear nature of the sign appeared unsustainable’. The domain of the sign is that of phonetics (and of phonology), of morphology, of lexicon, whereas the domain of the word is that of the sentence and of syntax. The priority he gave to syntax is the merit for which Nicolas Ruwet commended Benveniste, starting in 1967, in his Introduction to Generative Grammar. In effect, as Benveniste stresses, ‘syntax encloses the semantic, which receives its necessary form from it’, and it is again syntax that is ‘the source of all semantics and – secondarily – of all semiotics’. The ‘secondarily’ is apparently of great importance for Benveniste. The meaning of the predicate thus varies with its construction; ‘look’ does not have the same sense when I say ‘I am looking pale’ as when I say ‘I am looking for my hat.’ ‘Look’ is not ‘look (for)’. It is not the same ‘word’. ‘A language recreates its units in functioning.’ From ‘a language’ we have passed to ‘discourse’. Or take the word ‘encore’: the unit proceeds from how the frequent repetition of Latin hanc horam (and, as Benveniste notes, ‘frequent repetition is a fact of functioning’) produced a ‘conglomerate *ancora’, then French ‘encore’. We have here reached the heart of the constitutive operation of meaning’ that Benveniste also called, in his earlier works, ‘syntagmation’.

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Presuppositions Amongst the points to cover listed by Benveniste in his preparatory notes for the lectures in the Collège de France for 1969–70, mixed together with his notes for the Symposium, is that of the two syntaxes which he puts in order relative to one another: the ‘syntax of languages (langues)’ depends on the ‘syntax of language (langage)’. This is what he did with the semiotic and the semantic: no semiotic without the semantic. In other words, semiotic ‘signifiance’, lexical meaning, results from the semantic ‘intended’, from the intention to mean. ‘It is discourse, in language in practice, in repetition, in recurrence (we have seen it for the creation of the word “encore”) that ends in fixing signs (passing from words to signs), in growing the repertoire of signs, in diversifying them, and thereby in creating the corresponding concepts.’ This hierarchical (and genetic) conception of meaning can be formulated thus: signifiance, ‘the lexical “meaning”, must be radically distinguished from the intended “meaning”, wherein it is born’. We shall now give some brief attention to the double fate attributed to the notion of ‘movement’. It appears either in a paradigmatic analysis, as a function of the ‘sign’, an analysis by levels; or in a syntagmatic analysis, an analysis of ‘discursive succession’ – if one wishes to insist on ‘operations’ as opposed to ‘relations’ – as a function of the ‘intended’, of the sentence (or of discourse). But it must be borne in mind that the two domains are disjoined, and that the first, that of the ‘sign’, has no existence except as a function of the second, that of the ‘intended’. In semiotic (paradigmatic) analysis, a ‘descending’ movement (that adopted by Saussure) leads us to ‘purely formal elements’, deprived of meaning. Now, asks Benveniste, ‘does the formal structure of a sentence give access to the meaning?’, and is this ‘decomposition’ approach itself licit? ‘Do we have the right to do it?’; or, inversely, an ascending, ‘integrating’ movement; this latter operation Benveniste analyses as a ‘rise from one level to the higher level which delivers the element’s meaning’.



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The semantic, the verb and enunciation Reading the preparatory notes confirms our belief that Benveniste’s option is clearly phenomenological. He adopts the viewpoint of his Dutch colleague Hendrik Josephus Pos (1898–1955), a linguist of the Prague School and a disciple of Edmund Husserl, whose importance was recognised by Jakobson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In the Acts of the European Conference of Semantics held at Nice in 1951, which Pos was supposed to open, Benveniste says that Pos took care to make the link clear between language and ‘reality’, which however is the extra-linguistic domain par excellence, that is, ‘How man intervenes in language, and means something through language, is thus related to a certain aspect of reality.’ So it is not surprising that in 1968, Benveniste, like Pos, anchors the semantic in ‘the reality of immediate experience that the language is for the speaker’. It is a matter of ‘establishing a human relation between speaker and hearer. This is to say that every utterance, being intended, contains a degree of the lived. And on this account it is each time unique, referring to a unique lived and to a unique situation.’ The intended is ‘conveyed’ (the metaphor is habitual for Benveniste) by the sentence, which by definition has no ‘use’. ‘With the sentence, one enunciates something, one posits a reality or puts it in question, etc. One means something. A thought is enunciated in words, and it is the thought (of the speaker) that the hearer tries to grasp, to comprehend.’ We have traced the terms relating to the enunciation, the act of language which falls within the semantic. ‘To enunciate something’ is ‘to posit a reality’ (there is ‘a certain state of affairs, a new situation’, an experience to be shared), and it is also a cognitive act: ‘a thought is enunciated in words’. The parallel is manifest with Pos, who affirmed in 1939 that ‘linguistic subjects [. . .] enunciate their lived reality, without observing it as spectators’.6 Speakers, in enunciating, enunciate themselves as subject. Thanks to this ‘linguistic form’ called ‘verb’ (that is, going back to Greek rhēma – in Latin, verbum, in Sanskrit, ākhyā), denominated precisely as ‘enunciation’ by Aristotle, ‘that which corresponds to its deep function’, s­ peakers always

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establish ‘a relationship of truth, an affirmation of existence, inherent to every verbal form, without regard to its lexical form’. Here once again the dependence of the semiotic on the semantic is affirmed, whence this term-for-term opposition: ‘the semiotic necessarily starts from a linguistic material that is given, inventoriable, finite’. As signs are ‘given’ all at once, and constitute a finite set, ‘the sign takes on signifiance in an inter-sign space’. The semantic, for its part, belongs to a different universe: it is founded on the act of enunciation and thus on ‘sentences produced (not given), infinite (not finite) in number and in constant (not inventoriable) variation and transformation’. The privilege of the semantic is undeniable since the properties it brings into its universe are not logical but phenomenological ones. Thenceforth, ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ are not primarily objective; they belong to the speaker, whatever the speaker’s status; before being a social, political, scientific, etc. instance, the speaker is an enunciating instance. This is what justifies the analysis of a verb tense such as the ‘perfect’: ‘The perfect is part of myself.’ The verb and ‘the affirmation of existence’ are linked.7 Through the act of enunciation, speakers affirm their existence and postulate the ‘reality’ of the events in which they participate. Speaker, ‘state of affairs’ (reality) and ‘truth’ are interdependent. To choose to report an event in the perfect is for the speaker, for the enunciating instance, to affirm that it ‘is linked in some way to the one who enunciates it, if only through this: the space in which the event is posed is that of the observing which is the becoming aware and the assertion of truth’. Adopting the same instantial aim as in a note of 1968 entitled ‘Phenomenology of the “future”’,8 Benveniste analyses the future as a bi-directional movement, either a ‘flux’ (the term is Husserlian, as is ‘intended’) which is directed towards ‘us’, or the reverse movement followed by ‘subsequent humans’. The interpersonal ‘us’ is taken as a ‘fixed point’, quickly surpassed: it is in opposition to the class of humans of which the linguistic index is the ‘it’ marking the ‘absence of anyone’. Recourse must be had to the semantic dimension, resting on the ‘permanent function’ of the verb, the enunciation, in order to ‘implement the intended meaning’. Benveniste’s choice, in his notes of 1968, is made clear.



Editors’ Introduction 69

Last Lecture, Last Writings The courses professed in the Collège de France during these last years of activity bear witness to Benveniste’s creative capacities: the invention of the semiotic/semantic relation, of the notion of interpretance for the language, opening up the relation between the language and writing. On the ‘problems of meaning in language’ and of the relation to writing, one preparatory note is very explicit. Here is what is found on one sheet from a pad of paper (f. 257): General linguistics (Collège) Focus the lectures on the semiotic/semantic nature of language. Starting from the observation that non-linguistic sem. systems are unidimensional and iconic (signals, lights, maps) or deictic (traffic signs) but not noncial.9 Including language within semiology is both clarifying and ­falsifying, for language is not only ‘signalic’ and ‘indicative’, it is significative of messages, it is noncial nuntial, which no system is that is not derived from language (such as the sign language of the deaf).

How are Benveniste’s papers corresponding to these last lectures arranged in the archives of the BnF? The papers corresponding to the courses of 1968–9 are contained in a cardboard folder, apparently Benveniste’s own, containing fifteen identical sub-folders each stating, in his handwriting, ‘Collège de France, 1968–1969, Problems in general linguistics’, followed by the lecture number (boxed in red), sometimes with the word leçon and the date. Inside each of the folders are the lecture notes, mostly on sheets of A4 paper of different origins. But this does not exclude other forms or formats. And sometimes a group of papers has been visibly torn from a single notebook, inserted into a set of A4 sheets and bears the number of the lecture in which it is to occur, for example f. 118 which says ‘11th lecture’.

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Starting from Folder 9 (‘9th lecture, Monday 10 February 1969’) is added the title ‘Language and writing’. To this set contained in a cardboard folder must be added a sub-folder which also bears the title ‘Language and writing’ in Benveniste’s handwriting. This sub-folder contains fourteen folios of notes in very diverse forms. The notes corresponding to the last lecture are found in a beige sub-folder. The material of these notes is very diverse: different types of paper, different formats. Certain sheets follow in order for one same note. Three separate folios could pass for the note corresponding to the start of the lecture: • f. 139 [A4 sheet]: ‘We continue this year the study begun last year on problems of meaning in language’ • f. 141 [A4 sheet]: ‘1st lecture. I continue study begun last year Meaning in a language . . . • f. 152 [small notebook sheet; four identical sheets in succession]: ‘Start of course. Reading linguists’ works, description or comparison, one sees that . . .’ Several readings of all of Benveniste’s notes in parallel with the notes of the three auditors were necessary to establish a coherent and readable sequence.

Organisation of the Volume We have organised this edition into three chapters. The first two chapters are divided into fifteen lectures, given by Benveniste in the Collège de France in the 1968–9 academic year,10 in the following way: • Chapter 1: from the First to the Seventh Lecture. We have  ­ entitled it ‘Semiology’ because that is the dominant theme indicated by Benveniste himself. Benveniste here traces  the  history of the notion of meaning in linguistics and shows the necessity of a theory on this point: he indicates  how  he diverges from Saussure by locating the ­



Editors’ Introduction 71

theoretical relationship between the notions of semiotic and semantic. • Chapter 2: from the Eighth to the Fifteenth Lecture. Benveniste himself entitled this set of lectures ‘La langue et l’écriture’ (Languages and writing). The contents of this chapter are not found in any article published by Benveniste; it is entirely unpublished. • Chapter 3: the third and final chapter reproduces very precisely the very last notes prepared by Benveniste for the course which he was meant to give during the 1969–70 academic year. The stroke that he suffered in December 1969 prevented him from giving any more lectures after the first – he himself entitles it ‘1st lecture’ – on 1 December 1969, and this will be his last. It is with much emotion that we have devoted ourselves to establishing the text of this lecture. It took place five days before Émile Benveniste suffered a stroke whilst leaving a restaurant on 6 December 1969, a stroke that paralysed him and left him aphasic. He had to give up his courses. We have managed to establish this final lecture thanks to two sources: the lecture notes written by Benveniste himself11 and the notes of two linguists in the audience, Jean-Claude Coquet and Claudine Normand. This first lecture of the academic year 1969–70 stops at the threshold of the exposition of the notions bound to ‘semiotic/ semantic’; it prepares and introduces this problematic that Benveniste will not have the time to lay out before his audience. We have wished to make visible, in the edition of these lectures, the part transcribed directly from Benveniste’s manuscripts and the part which comes from the course notes of those in attendance (Jean-Claude Coquet for all three chapters, Jacqueline Authier-Revuz for the first two, Claudine Normand for the last). We have therefore inserted the notes taken by the attendees in different type, when they complement Benveniste’s notes. Additions and vocalic notations are put in square brackets. Starting from the order of archiving of Benveniste’s papers, we have had to proceed via recompositions. The course notes

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taken by the attendees allow us to re-establish the order of their reading by Benveniste since they follow what was actually pronounced. Certain folios seem not to have been used in giving the lectures; they may have been borrowed from another dossier, in particular the one for writing the article ‘Sémiologie de la langue’ which Benveniste had just published and which he moreover mentions expressly in the notes of his last lectures: ‘cite my second article here, p. 130’). Our interest is in hearing Benveniste beyond his own preparatory notes, and in the case of the last lecture, in advancing toward the ones that would have followed and that never took place, using the notes present in the archives. * Two annexes complete this volume. First, a document not previously published, though often mentioned, which represents the first draft of the only biography of Benveniste. Undertaken by Georges Redard, a renowned Iranianist and privileged interlocutor of Benveniste, it was not brought to completion but has a certain interest: it is the only existing document giving insight into Benveniste’s way of life and of doing linguistic work. We have moreover judged it indispensable to offer readers a description of the Benveniste archive in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. This archive – made up in part of a donation by the linguist himself during his life – is exceptional: it contains Benveniste’s working papers, starting with his notes from his student days, attending lectures given by his teachers (Meillet, for example) up to his very last reflections before he could no longer write. The nature of this archive makes it exemplary of what a linguist’s archive can be.

Notes   1 [Tr.: from Kierkegaard’s Journal NB: 165 (1847); possibly cited by Benveniste from Jean Wahl, Études kierkegardiennes (Paris: Aubier, 1938), p. 15.]   2 Since 2006 the ‘Genetics of text and linguistic theories’ team of the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (Centre National



  3   4

  5

  6   7

  8   9

10 11

Editors’ Introduction 73 de Recherche Scientifique/École Normale Supérieure), directed by Irène Fenoglio, has used this archive for developing its research on linguists’ manuscripts. See the end of ‘Sémiologie de la langue’, PLG 2, p. 66, or the end of ‘L’appareil formel de l’énonciation’, PLG 2, p. 88. Jean-Claude Coquet notes that Benveniste ‘consented’ to being president of the Cercle de sémiotique whilst insisting that ‘sémiologie and sémiotique had taken on a technical distinction in his work’ (La quête du sens: Le langage en question [The quest for meaning: Language in question], Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997, p. 33). All the citations contained in this section (‘1968–9: A Period of Intense Activity’) are taken from manuscript notes of the set PAP OR DON 0161 of the Benveniste archive in the BnF. H. J. Pos, ‘Phénoménologie et linguistique’, Revue internationale de philosophie 1/2 (1939), 354–65, 357. [Tr.: This is particularly clear with verbs which form their perfect with être ‘to be’ in French, e.g. Je suis allé ‘I have gone/I went’, literally ‘I am gone’, where ‘I am’ is the ‘affirmation of existence’.] Ms. note for the article ‘Sémiologie de la langue’, BnF PAP OR 53, env. 221, f. 104. [Tr.: Benveniste here uses the word nonciaux, and in the next paragraph its singular form noncial, which he then changes to nuntial. These are terms which he is innovating, the meaning of which is not certain but would appear to be connected to é-noncia-tion.] The preparatory notes for this course are filed as PAP OR 40, env. 80, ff. 1–239. The preparatory notes for this lecture are filed as PAP OR 58, env. 249, ff. 141–57.

1

Semiology

2 December 1968: First Lecture We shall, then, continue talking about problems in ‘general linguistics’. This notion is understood in various senses. The term ‘general’ can be given a dimensional value: the set of languages, the laws of their evolution. General linguistics as I understand it is the linguistics which questions itself about itself, its definition, its object, its status and its approaches. It is an endless questioning which develops and is renewed as a linguist’s experience deepens and outlook broadens. To talk about ‘linguistics’ is to talk about languages.1 Two questions to start: 1. Where is a language located? 2. How do we talk about it? The two questions are linked: the situation assigned to a language (how it is positioned); the nature of the discourse we have about it. For our part we posit that the essential nature of a language, which commands all the functions it can assume, is its signifying nature. It is informed with signifiance,2 even when considered outside any use, particular or general. If this property appears to us to transcend all the others – and it does so appear – it will command our discourse about languages, making it into a discourse about the characteristic we foreground: a language signifies. But what is signifying? We could rest content with a simple and sufficient definition: ‘signify’, for us and in this context, means ‘have a meaning, 74



Semiology: First Lecture 75

represent’, ‘take the place of a thing in order to evoke it in the mind’. But since a language is made up of distinct elements which every speaker can more or less distinguish, it follows that these elements share this signifying character that is proper to the language as a whole: these segments of a language are signs. Here already is a possible definition of linguistics: science concerned with linguistic signs. We immediately face a major problem which embraces linguistics and beyond. We here take on the notion of ‘sign’ which begins to emerge as one of the most novel and important of the science’s notions. Not the notion of sign itself, which is ancient (the mediaeval signum, the semeion of Greek philosophy), but the idea that signs can form coherent sets, systems of signs, and that they give birth to a new science: the science of signs, semiology.3 We live in a universe of signs. We use several sign systems concurrently, at every moment, without being aware of it: to point them out is already an exploration of the domain of semiology. First of all, we speak: this is a first system. We read and write: this is a distinct, graphic system. We greet, make ‘signs of politeness’, of recognition, of rallying. We follow arrows, stop at traffic lights. We write music. We attend shows, watch films. We manipulate ‘monetary signs’. We participate in ceremonies, celebrations, religious services, rituals. We vote in various ways. Our manner of dress depends on other systems. We also use partial evaluation systems (new/old house, rich/poor . . .). Let us pause a moment to think about this, since it is a new idea, and neither its birth nor its fortune could necessarily have been foretold.4 The novelty consists in seeing that: 1. there is in the world, in nature, in human behaviour, in human creations, a quantity of signs of very diverse types (vocal, gestural, natural), of things which signify, which have a meaning; 2. consequently, there is reason to believe that these signs constitute sets, are linked in some way; 3. relationships can be established amongst these sets of signs; 4. the study of signs leads to the creation of a specific discipline: semiology.

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The general theory of signs was glimpsed by John Locke (1632–1704), but the true birth of this theory occurred in two different places. It was born in the minds of two men who certainly did not know one another, even by name. In America it was Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), in Europe, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). Two solitary and singular minds, neither of whom published anything in his lifetime and whose impact would be posthumous.5 Peirce, living in poverty, and Saussure, in security and comfort, had the same worry. They worked and reflected at roughly the same time: second half or end of the nineteenth century and start of the twentieth. Peirce is a generation earlier than Saussure. They have in common the fact that they devoted themselves to reflecting on the sign and on meaning. But their education, their methods, their relationship to the object of their research are utterly different. Peirce is above all a ‘scholar’: logician, mathematician, historian and philosopher of science. His notes, published massively starting in 1931 (eight volumes by 1958 and still incomplete) are all obstinately devoted to a general theory of signs with a more and more complex terminology.6 The language as such is present throughout, as something evident or necessary, but not as a specific activity: he was never interested in the language’s functioning. With Saussure it was quite the opposite. He devoted his reflection to the language’s functioning. He founded the entirety of linguistics on a theory of the linguistic sign. He also formulated this fundamental notion of a general theory of signs, semiology, with linguistics as one of its branches. But he did not pursue his reflection on the general notion of sign any further.

9 December 1968: Second Lecture Examination of Peirce’s ‘semiotics’. Reading his Selected Writings, it appears that Peirce aims to elaborate a ‘universal algebra of relations’, from which he proceeds to a general division of signs into three classes7 according to the guiding principles of the ‘pragmatism’ taken up by William James: resemblance, contiguity, causality; thus, each sign recalls



Semiology: Second Lecture 77 the thing signified, a judgement occasions another judgement of which it is the sign.8   He establishes a relational triad: −− the fact of being first (‘firstness’): the mode of being of that which is such as it is, positively and without reference to anything else; −− the fact of being second (‘secondness’): the mode of being of that which is such as it is, with respect to a second but regardless of any third; −− the fact of being third (‘thirdness’): the mode of being of that which is such as it is, in bringing in a second (the object) and third (an inter­ pretant) into relation with each other.9 Peirce’s classification is multiple and complex. He defines ten tricho­ tomies and sixty-six classes of signs. Each sign can take on the function of: −− qualisign: its phenomenal quality; −− sinsign: the word counted on the page; −− legisign: the general type. According to their relationships with the object, three classes of signs: icons, indices, symbols.

The icon is a sign that has a relation of material resemblance with the object. The icon has an internal determination (qualisign) or refers back to an individual event (sinsign) such as the error distribution curve (diagram).

The index is a sign that has a relation of indication with the object. The index establishes a real (direct) relation with the object, such as a proper name, or with the symptom of a disease.

The symbol is a sign that has a purely conventional relation with the object. The symbol establishes an indirect relation with the object; being due to interpretation, it depends on a convention, a habit.   The domain covered by Peirce’s classifications is maximally extended,

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as these citations show: ‘the word or sign which man uses is the man himself’ or ‘my language is the sum total of myself.’10 Critique: The classification of signs is responsible for all of mental life. The language is included in this notion of sign, but the same object can be classified differently: −− Icon: the impression created by hearing music is iconic in nature, but a diagram is completely different, since it presupposes a logicomathematical elaboration. These are two distinct universes. −− Index: the proper name ‘Pierre’ goes with a determinate individual; fever goes with a disease. Two different universes. −− Symbol: everything which depends on a convention. But the proper name, taken in itself, can also be said to be a convention. A better determination of the objects can be envisaged: the icon estab­ lishes a relationship of reproduction with its object (designs, films, paint­ ing, maps . . .); the index refers back to anything which directs one toward the object, anything which points (e.g. the symbol à), gesture as such (index), the demonstrative pronouns in a language. But the language is of another nature. Such elements of a language signify only within the language.  The symbol, all that is conventional, the language, but also institutions of all sorts.   The domain of these three terms must be tightly restricted.

What ties these classes of signs to one another is not at all evident, nor are the principles on which the classification would be founded. So it is not obvious how to organise this mass of concepts, in which different orders cross, for example the word on a page, the word in itself, the different types of words, the words and not the language, so many varieties of signs. Objects of thinking, impressions, are also signs. That is why, out of all this, we have held on only to isolated denominations, but not an overall system. We are still in need of an in-depth study of Peirce’s symbolic thinking and theory of signs. Until then this will remain difficult to use.



Semiology: Third Lecture 79

16 December 1968: Third Lecture How do we circumscribe what is specific to Saussure? Whereas for Peirce the language is confused with the words, for Saussure, the language is the whole. The sign is an individual and social notion (and not a universal one, as in Peirce). In Saussure, reflection bears upon the language from three points of view: its description, its laws, the nature of its object. Three linguistics must be distinguished according to their object: (1) the languages of the world to be described and analysed; (2) within these languages, the interplay of the forces which make them diverse. The linguist’s task is to establish the ratio of regularities and differences; (3) and to reflect on the nature of its object. −− What the language is not; several different objects to be untangled. −− Distinguish the language system (langue) from the totality of language (langage) (difference of nature and difference of extension). In its totality, language is heterogeneous, personal and social, mental and physiological . . . For Saussure, a language (langue) organises language (langage). He then separates the language (langue) from writing and, negatively, the language from its realisation as individual speech (parole), since this part (being acoustic and physiological) does not belong to the language; sound is a particular branch of study, and, ultimately, secondary.   Saussure does not rely on meaning.   The sign is thus a social sign. This is the framework within which the notion has its existence. A language is an institution. It is something received; it cannot be changed by individual or collective decree; it has a conventional (arbitrary) nature.  An abstract system that each individual possesses in the form of a faculty and in the form of knowledge, a language is organised in signs; it is ‘a system of signs expressing ideas’, says Saussure in the Course in General Linguistics. As a system of signs, the language is integrated into other systems of signs such as writing, sign language, symbolic rituals, politeness formulae, military signals, etc.; ‘it is only the most important of these systems’ (Cours de linguistique générale, p. 33).   Linguistics will achieve its completion in semiology, which, as a whole that surpasses linguistics, will reveal to us the status of the sign.

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Saussure has a particular importance here. It is in his work that the notion of sign and of science of signs (semiology) takes shape for the first time. A language is seen both as a set of signs and as one of the semiological systems. Thus is defined the structure and relative position of the language; its ‘signifying’ nature and the dependence it finds itself in with regard to the other systems of signs amongst which it takes its place. The language, made up of signs, becomes one of the systems of signs. For us who are interested in the notion of sign and in semiology, once we admit, as in Saussure’s thinking, that linguistics is a branch of general semiology, it is then a matter of seeing: 1. whether the language will find its centre elsewhere than in itself; 2. how it will be defined within the totality of semiology. It is our firm conviction – and nothing so far has managed to shake it – that a language is not only made up of signs, but is a producer of signs, that the system which composes it itself engenders new systems of which the language is the interpretant. Forming a system means that signs are articulated together by an internal principle, and not by their logical structure as in Peirce. Although the mind is characterised by its faculty for establishing relationships amongst objects, no science is possible outside of language. Peirce ultimately makes the sign the basis of the entire universe. That is precisely what is disturbing. If everything is sign, from what is the sign born? From something that is already sign? But then, where will be the fixed point at which to dock the first sign relationship? There’s the rub. We can only establish a sign relationship on a difference between what is sign and what is not. Hence the sign must be grasped and understood within a sign system.

6 January 1969: Fourth Lecture Saussure sought the feature by which the language can be classified. Made up of signs, it is thus a semiological discipline.



Semiology: Fourth Lecture 81

Hence we are on our way toward a new problem. How is it that there are semiological systems? How many are there? Are they always the same systems or different systems? And if different, in what way? Is there a relation amongst them, and if so, what is it? Saussure asked none of these questions. He limited himself to assigning a future semiology the task of defining the sign, its place, etc. He said only that the language is the most ‘important’ of semiological systems. But from what point of view? Is it because the language has the privilege of universality? Simply put, the language is everywhere. The consideration is pragmatic.

What is the language’s mode of signifying? It is not a worry about taxonomy that led Saussure to conceive this place for the language. Saussure had the idea that the language is not classifiable in itself because it could belong to various sciences, physics (acoustics), physiology (articulatory phonetics), psychology, sociology . . . What pushed Saussure to search along this path that led him to semiology? It was his concern with classifying the language, which cannot be defined by the nature of its object, that object being quite unclassifiable. Saussure defines with a single stroke both the structure and the position of the language. It belongs to semiology because it is made up of signs. Saussure: ‘It is a feature of the language, as of any semiological system, in general, that there can be no difference within it between what distinguishes a thing and what constitutes it’ (Robert Godel, Les sources manuscrites du Cours de linguistique générale de F. de Saussure, Geneva: Droz, 1957, p. 196). This is a reprise of the definition: ‘In a language there are only differences, without positive terms.’ In effect, in Saussure, ‘term’ is used in relation to ‘system’. We need to prolong this reflection beyond the point indicated by Saussure. Why are there only differences without positive terms? Why is what distinguishes a thing identical to what constitutes it, or in other words, why is the being of a thing its difference?

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Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969

It is because the entire system exists only insofar as it represents, takes the place of certain things, ‘signifies’: the material quiddity of a term is indifferent; all that counts is: 1. its being-different, otherness vis-à-vis other terms of the system, condition of the functioning of this system; 2. its relation to the ‘thing represented’, an entirely conventional, ‘arbitrary’ relation. A semiological discipline, the language must be characterisable: 1. by its validity domain. This is the first condition. Such a semiological system is not and cannot be universal; 2. by the nature of the signs used, which is extremely variable. The signs have as their function to represent in some way or other. They have to be apprehended by the senses. Their number is reduced: 3. by the type of functioning of the signs; 4. by the nature of the response which the sign calls up. Example of a non-linguistic system – traffic signals: 1. they regulate the progression of individuals on the ground; 2. the nature and number of the signs is reduced to two: 3. stop or go (road open, road closed); sense involved: vision (for example, two colours are reserved for signifying). A simpler system is imaginable: presence or absence of a light, without regard to the choice of colour; 4. the two signs are of the same nature; they are in a binary opposition. Although the system is conventional, its action is prescriptive. Bound to its validity domain, it provokes a behaviour and carries no abstract knowledge. There are no redundant systems, used in the same way, in the same domain. Signification only functions within one single system on a defined domain. Otherwise, it would be useless or disturbing. But there can also be supplementary systems, such as sound signals.   Hence we have this new principle of convertibility of one system into another.   The systems are not closed universes, isolated from one another. The relationships amongst them are created by generation: a generating system, a generated system.



Semiology: Fifth Lecture 83   It is about a relation of derivation. A priori, the narrow-field system derives from the broad-field system. Musical writing derives from the writing of a language (musical notation closely follows graphic notation, the more so because it has to denote sung words) and choreographic writing.   A first system, then systems of transferences.

A semiological system is always, in principle, capable of generating one or several other semiological systems. Such systems of transferences would surely never have existed without the initial model furnishing a structure, and the number of elements considered is not, in itself, the criterion of the system’s complexity (hence the highly complex system of electronic calculators and comput­ ers reduce everything to the articulation 1/0).

13 January 1969: Fifth Lecture It is time now to introduce a new relation into the descriptive and comparative analysis of semiological systems, one that Saussure did not mention and perhaps did not see: the relation of interpretation. It is about determining whether the semiological system under consideration can be self-interpreting or must receive its interpretation from another semiological system. The question I am asking is about the relation of interpretation between systems (entirely different from Peirce’s notion of interpretant). To make it more apparent, and its dimensions more salient, we are first going to approach it from another angle, much more general still, that of the function of a society and a language. One consideration remains essential: is the interpretation of the system given by the system itself? Or is it given in another system? The answer is that, apart from music and the visual arts, semiotic systems other than language are not sufficient in themselves; all require verbalisation, first of all because only what is designated by language is meaningful. We therefore posit an engenderment relationship between language and the aforesaid semiotic systems, realised in a denomination relationship. This is also the language–society

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Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969

relation. One can ‘say the same thing’ in speech and in writing, two systems that are convertible into one another, because they are of the same type. One cannot ‘say the same thing’ in speech and music, which are systems of two different types. We do not have several distinct systems at our disposal for the same relation of signification. A relation of mutual non-convertibility is established between a language and a society. Linguistic and social structures are ‘anisomorphic’, as Edward Sapir said.11 We need to abandon the idea that a language reflects a society. It would be a bit naïve to think it possible to establish a relation between summary entities. How then could the presence or absence of a gram­ matical gender, tonal relationships, the number of vowels, how could all this correspond with a social structure?   Having posited this, it is necessary to distinguish between empirical languages (French, Chinese, their temporal articulations such as present and past tense . . .) and the base language which functions as an interhu­ man communication system. There are two levels to be respected, one contingent (historical), the other fundamental, in which common features are found (unconscious realities, identified with nature). The situation is altogether different with institutions which people change, compare, analyse, whence the variations of the designation systems.   Between the two systems, linguistic and social, there is no structural correlation. The relation can only be semiological, namely a relation of interpretant to interpreted, excluding any genetic relation.   The language contains the society.   The language can be studied on its own, as a formal system, without taking account of the society. The reverse is not the case. The society and the representations which govern it cannot be described outside linguistic realisations.   Only what the language denotes is social.   Comparing kinship systems as denomination systems, it is clear that they are intranslatable into one another (principle of non-convertibility). Each rests on a set of denominations and that alone exists.   The language is thus always the interpretant: 1. the society is susceptible to frequent changes and the language does not undergo the same variations;



Semiology: Sixth Lecture 85 2. the interpreting system provides the basis of the relationships which  permit the interpreted to develop as a system. The basis is provided by the language: for example, the pronoun system, I/ you versus he/she/it. Without this linguistic distinction which intro­ duces the relationships of dialogue and otherness, no society is possible. We thus accede to the intimate constitution of a language: (1) a language is formed of signifying units (constitutive property of its nature, absolute property); (2) the language can arrange these signifying units in a signify­ ing way (distinctive property).   None of the semiological systems, such as the road signs in Saussure, finds within itself the justification of its signifying power. They are all in a relationship with a language; the language plays the role, with respect to them all, of semiological interpretant, in other words of a model serving to define the terms and their relationships. Now, the language is itself a semiological system. It is, hierarchically, the first amongst them.

20 January 1969: Sixth Lecture It is not enough to posit with Saussure the existence of several semiological systems. We need to ask ourselves whether they co-exist freely, whether they can be created at will, whether they subsist indefinitely, or whether they hold themselves together in some way, whether there are relations amongst them and of what sort, whether they control one another, in brief, whether this notion of semiological system must be recognised as a factual datum or as a generating principle. Three remarks: 1. There are signs not established by man. They are not part of any semiological system, e.g. natural phenomena. The relationship amongst phenomena leads us to posit an order of prediction: rain follows thunder and lightning . . . and, thereby, to sketch a theory of mental operations; but no system. 2. An individual is creator of relationships; such is the case with the poetic phenomenon, but this relationship instituted by a single person is secondary with respect to the language.

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3. A society can produce magical interpretations of the universe. The domain of divinations belongs to a social class. Hence the flight of birds, thunder, lightning, dreams, etc. are signifying. These divinatory systems are obviously the products of a verbalisation. They are also dependent on the language.

It seems to us that semiological systems, representing something by means of specific signs, always have some relationship amongst them. Thus it is a matter of finding the criterion which permits us to recognise this relation. This criterion must itself be semiological in nature. There are systems that become signifying only through the intermedi­ ary of an interpreting system. There is at least one interpreting system permitting the derived signifiance.

Certain semiological systems are founded on an order of their own, such as music, articulated by sounds situated on a certain scale and combined in certain sequences. Music has moreover this particularity of being able to operate double combinations, on two simultaneous axes, on the one hand the chords of superposed notes, on the other syntagmatic sequences. But, in any case, it is not transposable and responds only to itself. It is for musicians to say what the sounds and their combinations ‘represent’. No sort of correlation possible between the units of this universe and those of another semiological system. A musical unit is signifying only in function of an internal convention. The notes A or C can thus be admit­ ted as units. The system is based on its own interpretation, without any possible correlation with a system of reference.

Entirely different is the principle of representation by images. Here speech intervenes in every respect. To indicate the ‘subject’, as the representation’s referent, as a necessary part of the film, which is ‘talking’, like text performed on stage. We are here dependent not so much on a language as on a ‘story’, a ‘narrative’, a spoken ‘action’.



Semiology: Seventh Lecture 87 We are very far from possessing a theory of the semiological system of the image. Neither of these two systems, that of music and that of image, can fully admit another system as interpretant.

It will be necessary to distinguish between the language as system of expression – without which no human society is possible – and the idiom-language, which is particular. It is the language as system of expression that is the interpretant of all institutions and of all culture.

27 January 1969: Seventh Lecture It might be said that a language belongs to the general system of ‘signification’, that, in its quality as a particular, more elaborated system, it is part of the world of signifying systems, the characteristic of which is to be systems, to present signification as distributed and articulated by principles which are themselves signifying. There is then an original force at work behind the great separations of units that appear to us eternally divided, such as ‘form’ and ‘meaning’, ‘signifier/ signified’. No system apart from a language carries the possibility for the signs of the said system 1. to form sets constituting new units, i.e.: in no other system are the units susceptible to composing themselves or breaking themselves down; 2. to function as ‘words’ of a ‘sentence’; 3. to modify themselves in some way (signifier or signified); 4. to behave as homophones or synonyms do. But then the question arises: is a language still a semiotic system in the same sense as the other systems are? Is it not something else? I think that the principal difference between languages and ‘semiotic systems’ is that no semiotic system is capable of taking itself as its object nor of describing itself in its own terms. I am starting to doubt that the language really belongs to semiotics. Might it not instead be just the interpretant of all semiotic systems?

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A basic distinction amongst systems has to be respected: 1. those which are self-contained (which are autonomous); 2. those which require an interpretant. A hierarchy has to be established between autonomous systems and dependent systems. As an example, the writing system, which exists only in relation to a language. But it is a matter of seeing how a system using the hand, leaving a written trace, represents the language. There is thus a first-degree signifiance, a second-degree signifiance, etc.   If a relative conversion is possible from a language to writing and vice versa, it is impossible between verbal composition and musical composition.   Semiological systems do not all have the same units or the same articulations. The sound unit cannot be broken down into smaller, con­ stitutive units, and it combines with nothing other than sound units. By itself the sound is not signifying. Likewise with colours. There is no basic unit, no constant values: the choice is arbitrary. In brief, conversions are possible only inside a given system.   Recall that: the semiotic unit is a unit of signification. −− Signaletic systems: only opposition is signifying, in relation to a basic signification given arbitrarily. −− Systems of articulated sounds in music: the sound (the only unit) is also a single event. The position it occupies in a certain scale (a math­ ematical disposition) is a fact about the relationship of one sound with respect to another. By itself, it is not associated with a signification. −− Image systems: what is the unit of the system? Is it the image? The colour? The criteria remain to be fixed inside a theory of the image. −− Language system: the units are isolable, constant and significationbearing. By its nature, this is a complete, autonomous totality. It is formed of signs, each of which has its signifiance value. There are two modes of signifiance, a characteristic which seems to exist nowhere else. Contrary to what Saussure thought, this is a prop­ erty that puts languages outside of the semiological systems: 1. Each sign is constituted by a relationship of signifier to signified. In the basic units, the signifiance is already included: it is constitutive of these units.



Semiology: Seventh Lecture 89 2. These units are assembled; they can only function together. The principle of this functioning is the second mode of signifiance. Signification is organised in a language at two levels.

Notes   1 [Tr.: French has two words corresponding to ‘language’, langue and langage. The distinction will be discussed by Benveniste in a later lecture. Only langue occurs in the First Lecture.]  2 [Tr.: Signifiance is introduced here in French as a technical term specific to Benveniste’s approach. It refers to the general condition of being meaningful. See Translator’s Introduction, pp. 52–3.]  3 [Tr.: Sémiologie and ‘semeiotic’ were the terms used respectively by Saussure and Peirce (see below).]  4 [Author’s note:] No special importance will be attached in this development of ideas to séméiologie or sémeiotique. The ‘less used forms’ like sémiologie or sémiotique, retained by the  Dictionnaire général de la langue française of Adolphe Hatzfeld (Paris: Delagrave, 1890), were recognised by the Académie Française in 1762 to denote ‘the area of pathology which treats the signs by which illnesses are detected’ (Nouveau Dictionnaire de l’Académie). [Tr.: To clarify, only the forms séméiologie and sémeiotique were recognised by the Académie Française and appeared in its dictionary through the nineteenth century. Hatzfeld’s dictionary includes both those forms and sémiologie or sémiotique, with the same restricted medical meaning.]   5 [Tr.: In fact both Saussure and Peirce published a fair number of works during their lifetime, but not ones on semiotics/semiology.]  6 [Tr.: The planned volumes 9–11 of The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce still have not appeared.]   7 [Tr.: As explained in the Translator’s Introduction (p. 32), text given in the different font is from notes taken by attendees of Benveniste’s lectures, added here when they complement Benveniste’s own manuscript notes.]   8 [Tr.: Adapted by Benveniste from Peirce, ‘Some consequences of four incapacities’ (1868). See Translator’s Introduction, p. 42. When Peirce calls resemblance, contiguity and causality the three principles according to which ‘[t]he association of ideas is said to

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proceed’, the tacit reference is to chapter 3 of David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748).]   9 [Tr.: This and what follows is drawn from Peirce, Letters to Lady Welby (1904). In the definition of thirdness, ‘(the object)’ and ‘(an interpretant)’ are Benveniste’s insertions, which have a basis in other Peirce manuscripts of 1902–3.] 10 [Tr.: Both from Peirce, ‘Some consequences of four incapacities’.] 11 [Tr.: Despite an extensive search I have not been able to find the word in Sapir’s published writings.]

2

Languages and Writing

3 February 1969: Eighth Lecture We live in the civilisation of the book, of the book read, the book written, of writing and of reading. Our thinking is constantly, at whatever level, informed by writing. This puts the entirety of a language, speech and thinking itself, into an ever more intimate relation, a maximally intimate relation, with writing, such that the language can no longer be dissociated from its real or imagined inscription. In particular, all reflection on the language calls up in our thinking its written form, where the linguistic signs take on a visible reality. This condition in which we find ourselves with regard to writing masks from our eyes the greatest difficulty of the problem, a difficulty that has much less to do with the matter than with the manner in which we instinctively envisage it; it is that, without an effort of imagination that very few of us are capable of, we are now scarcely able to tear ourselves from our worldly experience to rethink language and writing anew, in their primordial relationship. And, to begin with, what writing are we talking about? Saussure decides to talk about forms of writing going back to the Greek alphabet. But the others? We must not confuse the writing with the written language (I take this expression as signifying ‘the language in written form’). What Saussure has in view in his discussion is the knowledge of a language that we take in its written form. And he insists on the dangers, the illusions bound up with this representation. No one will contest this. But we are completely outside the problem 91

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of how the writing relates to the language. He confuses writing with the alphabet and the language with a modern language. Yet the relations between a modern language and writing are specific, not universal. At least with Saussure we know where we stand: in society, and not in nature, not in the mind and the universe as with Peirce. Writing is a system which presupposes a high degree of abstraction: we abstract away from the sound, or phonic, aspect of language with its whole range of intonation, expression, modulation. A limited segment of the phenomenon of writing must not be taken as a totality. It is a particular level. It is useless to propose a paral­ lel between French /kar/ and car ‘because’, or between /o/ and eau ‘water’. The language insofar as it is represented by writing, and this representation itself, have to be considered. We have to envisage the writing in itself.

This is a distinction which I am introducing and which is indispensable. For it alone allows us to think rationally about writing as a semiotic system, which Saussure does not do. It is nevertheless the first principle of the analysis of writing. If we posit that writing is, in itself and for itself, a semiotic system, we have to draw out the consequences of this. The graphē ‘represents’ the phōnē, that is the principle. Hence nothing can or should stand in the way of this representation, or interpret it otherwise than what it admits in itself. Writing must be kept here as establishing a reversible, biunivocal relationship between two and only two terms: graphē ↔ phōnē. The studies done to date have been about writing systems, not about writing in itself, the process of transposition in itself.   How do we verify the relationships between graphemes and sounds? With the word [wazo] oiseau ‘bird’, none of the four sounds of [wazo] has a correspondence in the six graphic signs /o-i-s-e-a-u/.

One might say that the graphē OISEAU represents the phōnē [o.i.s.e.a.u], never [wazo]. A semiotic system can only ­function



Languages and Writing: Eighth Lecture 93

on the principle of one signifier / one signified – hence one graphē / one phōnē. As writing becomes alphabetised, and ‘phonetic’, it is subjected more and more to the phōnē and thereby to the language. But these are historical and empirical conditions, in no way organic or necessary. With writing, speakers must break from their instinctive representation of speaking as activity, as exteriorisation of their thinking, as living communication. They must become aware of the language as a reality distinct from the use they make of it: this is already a very difficult operation – as anyone who teaches the rudiments of writing to children knows from experience. The language is suddenly turned into an image of the language. The complete activity that speakers engage in, the gestural as well as the phono-acoustic behaviour, the participation of the other, of all others, of the totality of possible partners in this individual and collective manifestation, all this is replaced by hand-traced signs. All acquisition of writing presupposes a series of abstractions. There is sudden conversion of the language into image of the language. For man in the state of nature, it is something prodigious and extremely difficult. The language is in effect an activity, a behaviour where one is always in the situation of dialogue. The passage to writing is a total upheaval, very long in coming to pass. Speakers must break from this representation of the spoken language as exteriorisation and communication. 1. A first great abstraction thus resides in the fact that the language becomes a distinct reality. In effect, instinctively, we speak when we need or want to speak, in some circumstances in order to obtain a certain result, with a person who has a certain voice, in certain rela­ tions of age, of friendship, etc. There are always situations in which speakers apply their speaking.

Speakers – particularly children – instinctively tie the applying of speaking to this specific nature of the situation they find themselves in and the particular need they want to express. We choose our words carefully: apply speaking. Speakers must become aware of the fact that, when they speak, they put into action a ‘language’ which the other also possesses and handles; and the fact that each of them speaks, but each, when

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speaking, and when speaking differently with a different voice, different intonations, in different circumstances, uses the same ‘language’. 2. Abstraction consists then in detaching oneself from this ‘con­ textual’  richness, which, for the person speaking, is an essential richness. 3. They must speak of things outside of the circumstances which make it necessary to talk about them, even though, for the speakers, these are living realities.

Children must abstract themselves from the need that makes them speak, from going to play with a friend, or from eating an apple, in order to ‘objectivise’ the linguistic datum /play/ or /apple/ although it bores them to bother with these things that do not exist for them. It has to do with a language which is addressed neither to their friends nor to their parents, a language spoken and heard by persons unknown. 4. The process of acquiring writing.

Another level of abstraction is imposed on anyone who accedes to writing: to wit, not only the awareness – however weak – of speaking transferred to the language, in other words to thinking, but the awareness of the language or of thinking – in fact, of words – represented in material images. From the word to the drawing of the word, an immense leap is accomplished, from speaking to the symbolic image of speaking. There is not just this step of becoming aware of the language; there is the discovery that when we speak, we make use of words. We speak in totality and this totality is realised by means of segments. There is not only the existence of recurrent individual words, but the relation between what we write and what we think is also in question.

For the act of writing proceeds not from pronounced speech, from language in action, but from inner language, memorialised. Writing is a transposition of inner language, and it is necessary first of all to accede to this awareness of inner language



Languages and Writing: Ninth Lecture 95

or of the ‘language’ in order to assimilate the mechanism of its conversion into writing. Inner language has a global, schematic, non-constructed, non-­grammatical nature. It is an allusive language.

Inner language is rapid, incoherent, because one always understands oneself. It is always a situated language, in a present context, which is one part of the general condition of language, thus intelligible to the person speaking and to him alone. But it is a considerable task to transfer this inner language, conditioned by the relation of the speaker with himself within a unique, changing experience and circumstance, into a form intelligible to others, and losing in its written aspect any natural relationship with what occasioned the inner language. This task requires an attitude entirely different from the one we have acquired through the long habit of transferring thinking to writing. To make inner language intelligible is a conversion operation that goes hand in hand with the elaboration of speech and the acquisition of writing.

Saussure defends the banal idea of writing as a system subordinate to the language. Now, nothing prevents us from imagining an ‘iconic sign’ (or ‘symbolic’, if you prefer, the choice of terms is completely independent of Peirce’s terminology) which would associate thinking with a graphic materialisation, in parallel with the ‘linguistic sign’ associating thinking with its idiomatic verbalisation. The iconic representation would develop in parallel with the linguistic representation and not in subordination to the linguistic form. This iconisation of thinking would probably presuppose a different sort of relationship between thinking and icon than that between thinking and speech, a less literal, more global relationship.

10 February 1969: Ninth Lecture If we put aside the oversimplified relations of a language to writing and representation (between the iconic representation of /house/ and the

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term ‘house’ the distance is immense), it is possible to study writing either in its mode of acquisition or, across history, in its various modes. But, historically, there are fundamental differences amongst writing systems.   To find the first specimens of writing, we must go back to the middle of the third millennium bc and probably further still, to the fourth mil­ lennium. I refer to the writing systems found in Egypt (proto-Egyptian) and Sumeria. But it is undoubtedly chance conditions that have pre­ served this evidence for us, and nothing guarantees that we see here the beginning of writing.   There is the problem of the ‘traces’ engraved on prehistoric objects. Are these the beginnings of the representation of a language? It has been asked whether certain images might not constitute narrations, but we shall never have the linguistic side that could be linked to these signs.   To construct a certain model of correspondence which could have existed in these distant epochs, we can think about realities closer to hand. Within historical time, in fact, we see applied the principle of pictorial reproduction. Several writing systems were created in the nineteenth century by people illiterate in alphabetic writing, including the Bamum in Africa, and in North America, the Cherokee and amongst the Inuit of northern Alaska.   In the mid-nineteenth century a mission was established in an Inuktitut language community. Alfred Schmitt (1851) wanted to preach, but had no written language available that could be used for communi­ cation. A converted shaman saw the missionaries writing and got the idea of writing his language. There is always an impulse starting from an already existing form of writing (imitation and not invention). Earlier attempts had taken place; envoys were sent bearing messages on the occasion of a feast of gifts and counter-gifts. The envoys made use of mnemotechnical engravings.

A notion which seems to me to be important and which has not yet been explored in its relations with writing is that of message. The messenger recites a text that he has memorised. He does not speak. It is not his discourse that issues from his mouth. It is the mouth and the language of another. What a singular situation, and how could it fail to organise a very particular discourse!



Languages and Writing: Ninth Lecture 97 Memory is an essential condition. It is necessary to record proper names, genealogies, accounts, inventories . . . A moment comes when traditions risk being lost, when a catalogue needs to be established.

When the messenger has to remember several different messages to be delivered to several persons, he needs an aide-mémoire such as quipu (the ‘knot’, in Quechua). He will be able to use graphic markers traced on a sheet of paper which will help him to reconstruct the particular text he is delivering to a particular recipient: they will be images summarily reproducing the principal facts which his discourse will mention. These procedures (knots, notches on a stick, combinations of strokes) are personal and not in common usage. We have written documenta­ tion of how certain texts of Holy Scripture were noted down in the Inuktitut language. This is still a personal mnemotechnics, but we are getting closer to writing, since there is imitation of Western writing.

When primitive man ‘represents’ by drawing an animal or a scene, he writes it. His ‘writing’ thus reproduces the scene itself: he writes the reality, not the language, because for him the language does not exist as ‘sign’. The language is itself creation. Hence we can say that ‘writing’ begins by being ‘sign of the reality’ or of the ‘idea’, that it is parallel to language, but not its decal. Pictography reveals traditional discursive recurrences of the type: ‘and then . . . and then . . .’. A drawing of a man indicates by the posture of the body and arms turned toward the following drawings that we are at the start or the reprise of a text: ‘And then . . .’.1

And then

Joseph

and

Mary

went

to Jerusalem

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Then, to communicate this New Testament message about the parents of Jesus, there come successively the pictograms of a man and of a woman leaning on a stick (Joseph and Mary) and, finally, an arrow point­ ing upward, meant to note the direction followed by the two characters: ‘And then, Joseph and Mary went to Jerusalem.’   For us, these pictograms introduce an infinity of relationships. No one, without the translated text, could retrieve the signification of such a succession of drawings. And above all, how could anyone work out that the first pictogram is a grammatical presentational instrument recurring as a tool? Another Inuit could not have understood this any more than we could.   Another example: /God/ is represented by an icon:

A circle with rays, bearing, in the left-hand side of the circle, a small vertical stroke capped by another small circle. How to interpret this? The sun? No, the Inuktitut have never had any solar divinity. We are actually dealing with a magical ‘mask’ (agaiyun in Inuktitut) from the shamanic tradition. Another Inuit was capable of translating it by ‘mask’, but not by /God/.   What is described by means of these images are events; this is not a language. Of course, these events are recounted in a certain language, but, in this narration, there is nothing specific to the language in ques­ tion. The referent is what is described. We are not dealing with a linguistic sign. Writing here is not a sign of the language, but a sign of the referent. The particularity of the language does not come into the equation. We see no direct correspondence between the language and the writing.



Languages and Writing: Tenth Lecture 99

I am not doing the genetics of writing systems; I am not searching for the origin of writing. I simply want to see what solutions people have given to the problem of ‘graphic representation’, and I observe that, as far back into antiquity as we can reach as well as in modern times, people always start by representing graphically the object of the discourse or of their thinking, which is to say the referent. The ‘natural’ tendency is to communicate by graphic means the things spoken about, and not the discourse which speaks about them. So it is inaccurate, taking into account the entire set of manifestations of writing, to say that writing is the sign of the language, which is itself the ‘sign’ of what is ‘thought’. We cannot say that writing is a sign of a sign. It has become merely a transcription of speaking.

17 February 1969: Tenth Lecture What then does it take for this graphic representation to become writing? It takes a veritable discovery: the speaker-scriptor must discover that the message is expressed in a linguistic form and that this linguistic form is what the writing must reproduce. That marks a genuine revolution: writing will take language as its model. The scriptor will henceforth orient his effort toward the search for a graph (graphie) reproducing the phone (phonie), and thus of a graph consisting of a limited number of signs. This great innovation was achieved independently, it seems, in various parts of the world, but with entirely different means. There is no necessary relationship between a language and its writing. Graphic expression in the case of the Inuit makes no reference to the Inuktitut language. These are not linguistic signs. Since it does not reach the actualised language, it is condemned to being individual. It is not transmissible.

The notation’s mnemonic purpose goes hand-in-glove with a naturalistic representation which is direct and global, not analytic. Hence this notation can lead to an interpretation, but not to a ‘translation’, either into their own language (retroversion) or into another. The infinite diversity, the unlimited productivity of possible messages imposes a limit on notation, and this

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limit is reached very quickly: the scriptor would need to invent new graphic ‘symbols’ ceaselessly, and still could not overcome the essential difficulty of notating what in the message is not susceptible to an iconic representation, what in effect belongs specifically to the linguistic function (the relationships amongst the components of the utterance, grammatical terms, etc.). The decisive step in reducing the number of graphic signs is already taken when we can begin to reflect: we are dealing with already achieved realisations, already constituted systems.

1. In China: Here there was the exceptional good luck of having a language in which each sign was a syllable, and each syllable was a distinct sign, and in which the signified of many of these syllables could have an iconic representation. This exceptional situation is due to the language’s structure itself, in which each linguistic sign coincides with a syllabic unit of articulation. Each sign is a signifier: a semiotic unit and a formal unit, which cannot be broken down into smaller semiotic units.

The analysis of the utterance was carried out effortlessly, and ancient Chinese writing included numerous pictograms. These pictorial representations offered an immediate correspondence with the term described. Thus mu ‘tree’, kuo ‘fruit’, ming ‘bowl’, the three superposed strokes for the number three, the combination of the four cardinal points starting from a central point that produces a fivepointed figure for the number five . . .

They thus stayed within the structure of the language when introducing units: the unit of meaning was at the same time the unit of (syllabic) articulation, and the writing depicted both meaning and form. The principal obstacle encountered was the profusion of homophones and the inevitable confusions which resulted from using the same graphic sign for several homophones. They therefore split the signs and adopted the use of phonetic and semantic ‘keys’:



Languages and Writing: Tenth Lecture 101 The encoding of intonation is the only innovation. Otherwise, fixity of writing, despite stylisations. Unique nature of Chinese writing; up to the present day, nothing has fundamentally changed.

2. In Mesopotamia: Sumerian writing transforms rather rapidly into cuneiform writing. The affiliation is clear between certain images and their referent. Thus the trace made by the cut reed (the ‘nail’) on the soft clay depicts the eye or the hand; but, in Akkadian, the drawing breaks down into several elements. The archaic ‘global’ becomes ‘analytic’.

‘eye’

(archaic)

(cuneiform)

What complicates matters was how Sumerian cuneiform was adapted to the Semitic language Akkadian. The two languages have different structures (Sumerian is not strictly monosyllabic). Once the breakdown into ‘nails’ took place, the system was totally fixed for as long as Akkadian culture survived in Mesopotamia and Asia Minor.

3. In Egypt: Here again, with hieroglyphs we have talking drawings: men standing, seated, holding different objects, birds . . . The material is well known.

The rebus method is used: the graph of a signifier is taken as the total or partial graph of another signifier which is wholly or partly homophonous with the first. Principle: the drawing of a cat (chat /ša/) and the drawing of a pot (pot /po/) gives ‘hat’ (chapeau /ša po/). The image itself proves that there is a breaking down of the sign, making it possible to use known graphic

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signs. Economy of the graphic sign, since the meaning ‘cat’ can be left completely aside and only the phone of its name retained. One can compose: cha-peau ‘hat’, cha-leur ‘heat’, a-chat ‘purchase’, and even with ch alone (partial phone): ch-aud /šo/ ‘hot’.   The breaking down is necessary, because Egyptian is a polysyllabic language. Hence the use of certain signs according to their sound form. Once the language was discovered, the notation of recurrences permitted reduction of the repertoire, though it remains large: several thousand in Old Chinese writing.

24 February 1969: Eleventh Lecture Last consideration. All these inventions are not steps in a linear development. Each of them is an absolute beginning, independent of the other systems. Each of the systems becomes fixed and no longer changes: immutable hieroglyphs; always identical cuneiform; Chinese characters identical to themselves. Linear B as well [Mycenaean writing]. Only the Greek alphabet was capable of evolving and being adapted to different languages. There is a close relationship between types of writing and types of languages, between a type of culture (economic development) and a type of writing; the Phoenicians and Greeks are merchants, sailors, voyagers, traders in the whole Orient. −− There are systems in which the graphic unit is identical to the sign unit: each graphic sign coincides with a sign of the language; neither lack nor excess. The graphic unit is the word. The only perfect example is Chinese. −− There are systems in which the graphic unit is inferior to the lin­ guistic unit. The graphic unit is a part of the sign (for example, the syllable). Into this category generally fall the systems practised today. These writing systems presuppose a crucial process: the breaking down of the unit of language, hence the possibility of considering the language as form, as independent of what it communicates.

First of all it is necessary to become aware of the utterance as such: that, for us, is perhaps the hardest point, and the least



Languages and Writing: Eleventh Lecture 103

recognised. The speaker needs to be aware that he has formed a sentence, he needs to objectify it, to detach it from the message it carries and to undertake to recognise and isolate its words. Segmentation into syllables is found in three different linguistic systems: 1. Sumerian; 2. Akkadian (a Semitic language); 3. Indo-European languages such as Cypriot Greek or Old Persian (Iranian). Syllabary systems are all hybrid systems from the start, since they retain links with two other types of graphic representation: −− writing of words (see the principle of the Chinese system). In the (Sumero-Akkadian) cuneiform syllabary certain complexes of signs correspond to specific linguistic units. A graphic convention gives rise to a word for frequently used terms such as ‘God’; −− writing of isolated, non-syllabic sounds, bearing the seed of alpha­ betisation. Thus, in the Cypriot syllabary system, a graphic unit like [sa-ta-si-ku-po-ro-se] corresponds to an articulated oral unit, a proper name for which we have documentation: [stasikupros]. Three of the syllabic signs (three support vowels) are not included in the articulated form: −− sa à s; −− po à p; −− se à s. Likewise, [po-to-li-ne] (accusative singular of the word ‘city’) is pro­ nounced: [ptolin].   There is still a discrepancy between the sound status and the graphic status. The graph does not allow direct access to the language. If we did not know Greek, we certainly could not find the distribution of vowels in the syllabic notation. We are close to alphabetisation, but the phenomenon is different.

The alphabetic Semitic writing systems constitute a decisive step. The consonant template is the bearer of meaning and the vowels have a grammatical function. Here again the graph corresponds to the linguistic structure. Concerning the historical

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form of Greek (fifteenth century bc), the Mycenaean syllabary, we know nothing. It is the Greek alphabet that achieves the great final progress: each sound is distinguished, no longer just the syllables, but the sounds, each reproduced by one letter and one only. Hence vowels and consonants are distinguished and both are written. Once again a structural necessity in a language with morphological variations where the form of words is not fixed, where the length of forms is highly variable, with alternations and partial variations. Semantics predominates in the Semitic structure; consonants take precedence over vowels. The play of vowels within a consonantal template indicates the grammatical facts. Indicating vowels is originally a completely exceptional phenomenon. The grammatical relationships are reconstituted.   In the Greek alphabet, the analysis of the syllable will give the same status to the vowel and to consonants.   The writing system reveals a semiotics of the language; thus emerges the difference between a language of the Greek type and a language of the Phoenician type. In Greek, the vowel is essential for determining the very meaning of the unit. It is through vocalic variation that two mor­ phological classes such as the second person pronoun and the neuter interrogative are distinguished: tu (ancient and dialectal form, replaced by su) as opposed to ti.

How did the transition take place from the syllable to the sound unit or phoneme? The decisive circumstance was: 1. the Phoenician invention; 2. the adapting of the Phoenician letters to Greek. The Phoenicians had already made the writing system conform to the fundamental principle of their language, which is the predominance of etymology or of the semantic over the grammatical, and of the consonantal structure over vocalic variation. They had thus dissociated consonant from vowel graphically, with only the consonant being explicit. The Greeks achieved a new step by systematically writing vowels and consonants separately, starting from their language in which grammatical



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variations often destroyed the etymological relationships (of the type – present lambanō ‘I take’ and perfect eilēpha ‘I have finished taking)’. The syllabic division of speech is, it seems to me, the natural division, since no sound of whatever sort can be isolated from its support vowel. The breakdown unit of speech will thus be either a vowel or a segment including a vowel (CV or VC). The natural articulation of speech is reproduced as natural articulation of writing. For the linguist, too, moreover, the syllable is a sui generis unit. Syllabic writing: To understand the creation of writing systems requires not only envisaging – from outside – the relation with the type of language, but trying to represent, in its very movement, the invention which extends the language. We see then that the inventors project in their writing system the type of representation they make of their language. In Chinese, ‘characters’ are constructed for each signifier: there is formal equivalence between a signifier and a character. That Chinese is monosyllabic is a completely external consideration. What counts is that, for those who imagined the writing system, it achieves the ideal model: each signifier and only one signifier is expressed by one sign and one only; conversely, each sign and one sign only corresponds to one signifier and one only (I leave aside the secondary arrangement which introduced the use of ‘phonetic’ characters so as to counter homophony). In a different situation, Sumerian obeys the same relationship: it turns out that Sumerian has a large number of monosyllabic signs. Therein lies the pragmatic foundation of the Sumerian syllabary: many signifiers were realised in one character. Then extension to the notation, this time of the decompositional type of the Semitic languages of Mesopotamia. Representation of the utterance in writing: in Greek, starting with the first dialects transcribed, the parts of the utterance are in a strict relationship; there are articulations of a phonetic nature (phenomenon of sandhi which affects the initial or final sound of certain words). The continuity of an articulated discourse and the modifications which are produced between the end of one sign and the start of another go hand in hand. The flux of speech is in some sense materialised.

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Primary speech is a flux of words, a continuum. Secondary speech (writing) is also in many cases a continuum (epigraphic texts show no separation of words). It can also be affected by separations. Punctuation is the expression in secondary language of the syntactic divisions and intonations of primary language: end of the utterance. A double problem: that of converting discourse into linguistic form (the need to reduce the utterance to its constituent parts and to recognise that there is a limited number of signs) and that of writing as a formal system. The process of formalisation allows us to detach the language from its use.

3 March 1969: Twelfth Lecture The auto-semiotisation of the language: The writing system has always and everywhere been the instrument that has permitted a language to semiotise itself.

This means that speakers stop on the language instead of stopping on the things enunciated; they take the language into consideration and discover it signifying; they notice recurrences, identities, partial differences, and these observations get fixed in graphic representations which objectivise the language and summon as images the language’s very materiality. The writing system, and particularly alphabetic writing, is the instrument of the language’s auto-semiotisation. How so? In virtue of the following propositions: 1. a language is the only signifying system which can describe itself in its own terms. This metalinguistic property is exclusive to languages by virtue of their being the interpretant of the other systems; 2. but for the language to semiotise itself, it must proceed to an objectivisation of its own substance. Writing progressively becomes the instrument of this formal objectivisation.



Languages and Writing: Twelfth Lecture 107

Fundamental principle of writing Initially, one wants to transmit or save a message. Hence one wants to vehiculate an utterance at a distance, one wants to realise the semiotic graphically. A nice example is the message from the Scythians to Darius in Herodotus [IV, 131, a message in the form of a rebus: the Scythians sent a rat, a frog, a bird, five arrows]; next comes the discordance of interpretations; nothing shows better the impossibility of reaching the semantic in language without passing through the semiotic plus the grammar. Writing thus has as its necessary bases the trace of the minimal individual sign in the semiotic order, and in turn this order, to dissipate the confusions of homophony, must manifest in the graph its distinctive constitution in discriminating elements (‘bread’/‘bred’, etc.).2 If we reason by induction in order to find the first model of the relation between languages and writing, we see that the general evolution of known graphic systems goes in the direction of subordinating the writing system to the language. One might say that writing has been and is in principle a means parallel to speech for telling things or for saying them at a distance, and that writing has progressively been literalised by conforming to a more and more formal image of language. Speech is produced formally in discrete words, assembling the parts of a whole one after the other, whereas ‘writing’ is first conceived as a globality, synthetically enunciating a whole train of ideas, telling a whole story. In this sense ‘writing’ may be said to have a much closer resemblance to ‘inner language’ than to the discourse chain. 1.  Languages semiotise everything A language can – and alone can – endow any object or process whatsoever with the power to represent. For an object to be ‘sacred’, for an act to become a ‘rite’, requires the language to enunciate a ‘myth’, giving the reason for their sacred or ritual quality, rendering the gestures or words ‘signifying’. Every social behaviour, every human relation, every economic relationship presupposes ‘values’ enunciated and ordered by the

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language. The most elementary interhuman functions, those which maintain the existence of individuals, the functions of production and generation, are signifying functions first and foremost, relying on kinship relations which consist in their being denominated. 2.  Languages semiotise themselves The language carries out a reduction of itself. From its instrumental function is spawned a representative function that has writing as its instrument. Writing then changes function: from an instrument for iconising the real, which is to say the referent, starting from discourse, it becomes bit by bit the means for representing the discourse itself, then the elements of the discourse, then the elements of these elements (sounds/letters). From that point on, the language could be treated, as Aristotle would do (De interpretatione), as a signifying organism, instead of considering it simply as a means, an instrument. From a historical point of view, a first phase is when writing has served to fix an oral message conceived in the language; a second phase is that of the invention of writing such as it proceeds from the desire to set a book down in writing, in other words a written composition, and no longer a spoken message. In Europe, three writing systems will be retained: the Armenian, the Gothic and the Slavic. Forged indepen­ dently, the three writing systems have in common one same purpose, that of translating the Bible. Slavic certainly developed from Greek, and Armenian and Gothic very probably did as well, with an at least partial intervention from Latin. These are the first written texts we find.   The creation of graphic systems for languages which did not possess any has the particular feature of being born independently, but with the same purpose: to translate a text. An entire world of new notions had to be passed on via a text read, written (and not just a spoken text). The translation process is double: convert one language into another and at the same time convert one graphic system into another. This is something totally different from the transmission of a royal edict, a contract, a letter.



Languages and Writing: Thirteenth Lecture 109

10 March 1969: Thirteenth Lecture Our analysis leads us to recognise the close link which exists between the type of writing and the type of language, between the manner of dissociating the elements of speech and the manner of writing these elements. Today we make use of the instruments of linguistic science, but before a science of languages was constituted, how were things represented? How did those who did not have the instruments of linguistic analysis at their disposal posit the relationship between graph and phone? There is evidence which we are led to reread and reinterpret.

We have an example of this reflection on the relations of a language and writing in Plato, not in the too famous Cratylus, but in the Philebus. To appreciate the full thrust of Plato’s observations requires situating them within the development which gave rise to them, starting from the definition of pleasure. Plato begins with a discussion of the nature of pleasure and the infinite variety of sensations which permit it. In principle, pleasure is unitary, and yet everyone experiences it. Notions of the one and the infinite. One needs to know what sort of unity is necessary for it to be install­ able within infinite variety and yet remain always retrievable. How is the unity retrieved? The method is divine. The Ancients who lived closer to the gods have transmitted this tradition (pheˉ meˉ ) that everything which exists is composed of one and of many (eis and polla); the discourse includes the limited and the unlimited (peras and apeiria). The two aspects, unity and diversity, are conditioned by the fact that there exists at the same time a limit and a non-limit. Given this organisation of things, we must posit in whatever set and search in all cases for this unique, ever-present form, then see whether there might perhaps be two of them, and only two, or three or more. We begin to count (arithmos). This is not a metaphysical unity. After one, we move to two, three and beyond. The unit(y) is delimited within the totality.3 And each ‘one’ (ta en) must be subjected to the same dissociation until it can be seen that in this primitive ‘one’ may perhaps be contained many elements, and how many. The approach consists of taking the units in a hierarchical

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order. At each level of analysis the units must be enumerated. The variety of the elements must be reduced to the numerable.   Socrates takes letters (ta grammata) as an example. The sound (phoˉ neˉ ) that we emit is one, but, at the same time, unlimited, in all of us and in each of us. Knowing the number and nature of these elements is what makes us ‘grammarians’, the ‘knowledgeable’. Sounds are linked to letters and the study of the sound (of the phoˉ neˉ ) commands that of the letters (ta grammata). Socrates then considers music. After the grammatikos, the mousikos. In this art too, the sound is one. Three distinctions are to be posited: the grave, the acute and the in-between (the average). To be a mousikos one must have the ability to analyse and recognise: 1. the differences, the intervals (diastemata); 2. the combinations (sustemata). After the diastema (finding how many intervals there are and what their boundaries are), comes the system (the combinatory of sounds).   Socrates now returns to the example of letters. The Egyptian God Theuth (in Greek, Thoth) was the first to recognise that, in this infinity, the vowels are not ‘one’, but numerous. There are others that have no ‘voice’ (phoˉ neˉ ), but a ‘sound’ different from the voice (phtoggos), and are also enumerable. A third order of articulation is constituted by a series of ‘aphones’ (aphoˉ nos). The god divided these voiceless sounds like the two others, until he found their number. He gave each vowel the name ‘element’ (stoicheion).   Considered as a set, these first elements form a unity. It is for ‘gram­ matical science’ (grammatikeˉ techneˉ ) to deal with them.   The analysis of language is thus given as divine (not just the origin of language). The man instructed in letters, the grammatikos, is the man instructed in the structure of the language, who in other words knows the basic structure of the language, the structure of the distinctive ele­ ments, situated below the level of signification.   What is the method? 1. It is necessary to proceed from multiplicity and to recognise the constant terms. 2. The analysis dissociates and identifies units on several levels. One must always arrive at numbers (at a limit). This number stands opposed to the absence of limit (apeiria) which is the state of ‘nature’.



Languages and Writing: Fourteenth Lecture 111

This notion of limit is of capital importance: it constitutes the analysis of the language from the formal point of view and it conditions the approach taken in the first inventions of writing properly so called. 3. The analysis of the language is put on the same plane as the analysis of musical sounds. Music was more important, much more general than the ‘grammatics’ that came long after. 4. The relationship of the one and the multiple is found both in knowl­ edge (episteˉ meˉ ) and in the experience of sensations. This distinction must therefore be introduced in all philosophical reflection embrac­ ing things and human reactions to things.

17 March 1969: Fourteenth Lecture We have up to now studied writing as a phenomenon and in the perspective of the language in order to analyse its functioning. Today I wish to look at writing as an operation and in its denominations. The operation exists only to the extent that it is denominated. Thus there is a linguistic process here: how a language denominates the act which gives it written expression. What the terms used signify, and not what they designate, which we already know. Such an analysis of terminology is instructive if and insofar as we can distinguish between designation and signification. There is an order imposed by experience and pedagogy: first read, then write. But this is not the order of their invention.

Writing was the founding act. This act can be said to have transformed the entire face of civilisations, and to have been the instrument of the most profound revolution that humanity has known since fire. We note from the outset a dividing line between two worlds of lan­ guages and civilisations: from north to south (Mesopotamia, Egypt) and from east to west. To the east, in the reality of linguistic designations (and also in other manifestations), we encounter civilisations of the written characterised by the intellectual and social primacy of the

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written object. Writing was the organising principle of society; this is the civilisation of the scribe. To the west, in the Indo-European world, exactly the reverse. There the world was built without writing and even in contempt of writing.   In Egypt, in Sumer, there are monuments, statues, which attest to the importance of the scribe. Writing is a divine gift. In the Indo-European mythologies, nothing of the sort. This act does not count as one of humanity’s great acquisitions. No Greek divinity of writing.   In its full literary flourishing, in Prometheus Bound (fifth century bc), Aeschylus ends his inventory of the inventions attributed to Prometheus with that of writing, ‘the combining of letters’ (grammatoˉ n sunthesis). Nowhere else is such a tradition found. Instead, the important things are fire, numbers, the stars . . .   In the Sumerian world, we have a major term: dup, which signifies ‘tablet’, the written; dup-sar, the scribe.   In Akkadian: tuppu, with all that concerns writing, the material, the scribe’s social position, libraries, etc. All this is a Sumerian heritage.   In Old Persian and only in Old Persian (the Achaemenid civilisa­ tion, long subjected to the Akkadian civilisation), the term used is dipi- ‘inscription’. It proliferated through compounding and derivation (‘he who writes’, the ‘archives’ . . .). Many centuries elapsed between Old Persian and the Persian dıˉvaˉn (collection of the works of the poet Shams Tabrizi). The affiliation between dipi- and dıˉvaˉn is certain. Goethe adopted this term to denominate a set of poems in which he mixed together Oriental and Occidental tradition. There is a Western history of ‘divan’. In Turkish, it is the official chamber in which the most important governmental affairs were debated. The office was comfortably furnished with ‘divans’, whence the Occidental term.   Nothing has survived of the first meaning, whereas, further to the east, that meaning has been kept: dipi- entered the Sanskrit vocabulary (the Persian administration ruled over the provinces of north-west India). It is the source of Sanskrit lipi- ‘inscription, writing’.   To the west, there is no common term for the act of writing. Each language has invented its own term. Graphoˉ in the sense of ‘write’ is not found in Homer. We know that there was a syllabic writing system used in the mid-second millennium in part of Greece (Mycenae).4 CretanMycenaean writing (Linear A, Linear B) was thus absent from the aware­ ness even of its contemporaries. A new tradition is formed which takes the invention of writing back to the Phoenicians.



Languages and Writing: Fourteenth Lecture 113   In Homer, graphoˉ means only ‘scratch’, ‘scrape’, ‘nick the flesh’ (e.g. Iliad XVII, 599). Later, ‘hack stone to inscribe a trace’. There is a vague allusion to the existence of writing in one passage (Iliad VI, 169 and 178) where Homer retraces the story of the hero Bellerophon. He is sent by the king of Argos to the Lycians, a people of Asia Minor, with a tablet ‘with closed folds’ on which were engraved (graphein) baneful signs (seˉmata lugra), bearers of a fatal message (seˉma kakon). The king of the Lycians was, in fact, ordered to put him to death.   We know that one part of the Hellenic world had writing, but the Achaeans and Trojans could neither read nor write. −− In Latin, too: scriboˉ signifies ‘scrape’, ‘scratch’. −− In modern German, schreiben, but in Gothic, meljan (compare German mahlen ‘to paint’): ‘to blacken, to dirty’ (Greek melas ‘to dirty with colour’). Painted traces are involved. This is no longer engraving, but painting. −− In Norse, rita, in Old English, writan; meaning: ‘carve’. −− In Slavic, borrowing from Iranian pisati, in the sense of ‘write’. −− In Old Persian, dipi- is the term denominating the ‘inscription’. And the term for ‘write’ is totally independent. It is composed of a preverb ni- and a root pis-. Ni- indicates a process carried out by ‘descent’: ‘inscribe’ and pis-, the process ‘paint, prick’ (compare the technique of tattooing). The root was borrowed by Old Slavic and the verb is related etymologically to Latin pingoˉ , ‘draw, paint’. Also subject to examination are the elements of writing, the letters: −− In Greek, gramma is derived from graphoˉ , but the origin of litera remains unknown. −− The competitor to gramma is biblos and for any written document, biblion. Biblos or bublos is the name of the material, papyrus, and Bublos is the name of a Phoenician city, a great centre for the exportation of papyrus. But nothing in these terms relates to the act of writing. −− In Germanic, the translation of these terms gives: for Gothic, boka ‘letter’, bokos ‘book’. In German, Buch, the name of the beech tree (Buchenwald ‘beech forest’), related to Latin faˉgus and Greek phagos, the ‘beech’ or the ‘oak’, depending on the region. Here again, a tablet of bark is the first signification: the material support has become the name of the written object.

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Gothic boka is of great importance, because it takes us into a complex lexical situation which itself reflects the conflict of several notions: the conflict of the old and new writing (runic/ Roman), the appearance of a civilisation of the written (written account; engagements and divorces; epistles), the notion of the (holy) Book of the Bible; and finally the opposition of the letter and the spirit in St Paul. All this is rendered by bokos, the ‘written tablet’ (and bokareis, the ‘scribe’). In Old Irish, the written letter, isolated, is called bok-stafr, the ‘little rod’, the ‘sign’, like Buchstabe ‘letter’ in German; runa-stafr is the ‘stroke of runic writing’, magical (runa means ‘secret’). Bok-stafr relates to Latin writing and the writing of the holy book.   With the new notions attached to the written – the opposition of the letter and the spirit – a ‘lay’ civilisation of sorts appears.   In the Greek world, the associations are completely different. Plato in the Phaedrus (275c–276b) devalues writing in favour of speech. What is frightful in /writing/ (/grapheˉ /) is that it resembles drawing (graphoˉ signifies both ‘write’ and ‘draw’). Everything that results from drawing presents itself to us as living beings (zoˉ graphia). But if we interrogate them, these figures are majestically silent. It is the same with written words (logoi). They cannot defend themselves as they are passed from one person to another; they are content to signify (seˉ mainein), but they have left the world of living relations.   The close, consubstantial and, in our view, essential association of writing with language was not immediately seen.

24 March 1969: Fifteenth Lecture Start of the last lecture. Our objective was to study the language, then its relation with the writing system, to see how each of them signified (carried out a signification with the help of a system of representative and constant distinctions). Now we find ourselves faced with this observation: the language and writing signify in exactly the same way. The rapprochement between /the language/ and /writing/ allows us to establish a homology relationship between /speaking/ and /hearing/ on



Languages and Writing: Fifteenth Lecture 115 the one hand, and /writing/ and /reading/ on the other. In other words, /speaking/ is to /hearing/ what /writing/ is to /reading/.   Notion of /reading/: there are two ways of understanding this operation.   In Akkadian, amaˉru is ‘see, observe, assure oneself of something’ and also ‘read’ (which takes as its direct object the name of the tablet); šesu is ‘call someone by name, cry out, call for’ and also ‘read’.   In Chinese, also two terms: tou, for ‘read with the eyes’ and nien, for ‘read aloud’.   In Greek, no verb to denominate the specific act of ‘reading’. In the Homeric language, the verb ana-gignoˉ skoˉ signifies only ‘recognise’ (recognise graphic signs as signifiers within the system). Symmetrically, ‘write’ and ‘read’ do not exist as such. After Homer, it designates the act of reading aloud in judicial or political assemblies. The operation is symmetrical with that of ‘hear’.   With Latin legere it is entirely different. (There is no common base to all these terms; a reorganisation is carried out in the lexicon of all the languages.) Stricto sensu, legere signifies ‘collect scattered elements’ (ossa legere ‘gather bones’). In the operation of reading, the collecting of written signs is done thanks to the eyes.   In Gothic, in the translation of the Gospels, anagignoˉ skoˉ or legere are rendered in two different ways: −− either in relation to chant (saggws boko, the fact of ‘chanting the Gospel’); us-siggwan, in which us- signifies ‘extract’, and siggwan ‘sing’, like German singen. It concerns ‘recitation’ (anagnoˉ sis), ‘public reading, with conventional articulation, in a consecrated place’; −− or in relation to the eyes scanning a material trace: anakunnan, trans­ position of anaginoˉ skoˉ , in which kunnan is related to German kennen ‘to know’. In the Epistle of St Paul to the Corinthians, 2 Cor. 1.13, anakunnan translates anaginoˉ skoˉ : ‘For we write none other things unto you, than what ye read (anaginoˉ skete) or acknowledge.’ In German, lesen does not go back to any word of Gothic whatever. Gothic lisan signifies ‘reunite’ and only that. But there is a transfer of meaning starting from the imitation of Latin which produces secondarily lisan ‘read’.   In English, to read is isolated. Its specialisation to its current meaning is recent. In the Middle Ages, the corresponding term, raedan, has a great

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semantic richness: ‘advise, decide, interpret, explain’ and with nouns relating to the written, ‘read’. Reading is considered as ‘explanation, enlightenment’. Related to German Rat, ‘council, counsellor’.   In Norse, two uses signifying ‘read’, but they are not applied to the same writing: 1. rad¯a, for runic writing; reading is accessible only to those capable of explaining the ‘fate’ reserved for another; 2. lesa, for the new Latin writing, in the sense ‘collect signs’, henceforth within the reach of all. In Slavic, cˇitati, ‘read’; etymologically, ‘be intensely attentive’. ‘Read’ as an intellectual operation: ‘calculate, count’.   In Old Persian, pati-pr̥s, etymologically ‘interrogate’. To question the written text (the text is mute, we read in the Philebus). In the Semitic languages, qr’ signifies ‘proclaim’ (reading aloud) and, in opposition, ktb ‘write’ (‘prick, tattoo’).   We thus see coexisting very early another way of reading, either by public enunciation (the reader-crier), or by inner language (the written signs are reunited and interpreted). In sum, either public reading (the speaker expresses himself through an interposed person, who retrieves the phoˉ neˉ , the talking voice), or inner language which is not transmitted in sound elements.

Latest stage of my views, partly correcting those which precede.

The Language and Writing Contrary to: ‘The language is independent of writing’, Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, p. 45,

all the problems of the relations between the language and writing are renewed if we posit this fundamental principle: writing is a secondary form of speech. It is speech transferred from hearing to sight: speech, auditive only, becomes writing, visual only. All is explained by this principle, that writing is still speech, in a secondary form:5 1. A correlation can be established between language type and type of writing:



Languages and Writing: Fifteenth Lecture 117

−− a language with fixed signs and writing with fixed signs (Chinese), neither the sign nor the character can be broken down. In cases of phonic ambiguity, the graph intervenes to resolve it; −− a language with variable signs and writing with (formally) variable signs: in effect, only alphabetic writing can restore the exact configuration of the phone of the signs and consequently produce visually the variations of the sign (morphological variations: from walk to walks, walked, walking, etc., with identity of the segment /walk-/ and variation of what follows). 2. Writing is manifested as a secondary form of speech in that it bears the two properties, semiotic and semantic, characteristic of discourse, and of discourse alone, or of linguistic expression alone, in contrast with other semiological systems. It is clear that writing could not short-circuit speech (that is, express by entirely distinct means, not homologous to speech); it must ‘follow’ speech, obviously, since it is nothing other than a form of speech. The language serves as interpretant to be put in relation with related systems. What is the relationship between the language and its writing, both posited as signifying systems? Everything comes down to taking sides on a text of Saussure: ‘The language and its writing are two distinct systems of signs; the latter’s unique raison d’être is to represent the former’ (Cours de linguistique générale, p. 45).   What meaning should be given to these two definitions, one of which depends on the notion of ‘sign’, the other on that of ‘representation’? We must beware the power of the terms we manipulate. 1. Within the notion of ‘linguistic sign’ necessarily resides that of ‘lin­ guistic system’. Can we then speak of a ‘sign of writing’ in the sense in which we speak of a ‘linguistic sign’ (signifier + signified)? How do we analyse a graph? A ‘signifier’, for example, can be grasped from the traces (a vertical stroke followed by a circle and their combi­ nation). But the ‘signified’? The graph refers to a phone. Or a graph + phone relation. That is all. We are not dealing with a system of signifiers,

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but simply a grapho-phonic correspondence. ‘Sign’ is taken in its ordi­ nary sense and not a technical one, hence is without interest. 2. In what sense should ‘representation’ be taken? Writing ‘represents’ a secondary form of speech, which is first. It is transferred speech. It allows the language to semiotise itself.

It would not have been possible to reflect on the analysis of spoken language if this ‘visible language’ that is writing had not been available. Only this realisation of a secondary form of discourse has made it possible to become aware of discourse in its formal elements and to analyse all its aspects. Writing is thus a relay of speech, it is speech itself fixed in a secondary system of signs. But as completely secondary as it is, this system remains that of speech itself, always apt to rebecome speech. Writing is speech converted by the hand into speaking signs. Hand and speech work jointly in the invention of writing. The hand prolongs speech. The primary system voice (mouth)–ear is relayed by the secondary system hand (inscription)–eye. The hand plays the role of emitter when tracing letters, and the eye becomes receiver when collecting the written traces. Between the mouth and the ear, the link is the phone emitted– heard; between the hand (inscription) and the eye, the link is the graph traced–read. ‘Read’ and ‘write’: but first, where does the boundary lie between ‘pictography’ and ‘writing’? We can trace it with certainty: a pictograph can be understood, it cannot be read, whereas writing is only that if one can read it. That says it all: reading is the criterion of writing. ‘Read’ and ‘write’ are the same process for a human being; the one never occurs without the other; they are two complementary operations so tightly and necessarily associated that the one is like the reverse side of the other. Let us look more precisely for their relation to speech. It appears to us, if we consider them together as tied to speech, that the relation of reading to writing is symmetrical to that of heard speech to enunciated speech. ‘To read’ is ‘to hear’; ‘to write’ is ‘to enunciate’.



Languages and Writing: Fifteenth Lecture 119

In sum, what is the relationship between the primary system (speech) and the secondary system (writing)? As soon as we position writing as the prolongation of speech and still as a form of speech, it appears that writing is not a sign, but a relay of speech: a device which picks up and retransmits the set of signs received. A language is the only semiological system that signifies in two different ways: 1. As a set of signs. All the units are then so many signs. They are susceptible to being recognised by all those who share the language. These units are transposed insofar as they lend themselves to a rec­ ognition by the writing system. This operation of unit recognition is performed outside of any use. Thus the homophones vin (‘wine’), vingt (‘twenty’), vint (‘came’), vain (‘vain’), vainc (‘wins’) . . . are the graphs of one same phone.

Writing distinguishes the signs of the language that are merged in speaking, by showing what discriminates them. 2. As an assemblage of signs bearing signification. There are complex necessities which, when satisfied, make possible the construction of utterances signifying by means of signs. ‘Understand’ is the essential term of this second operation. ‘Recognise’ and ‘understand’ are addressed to completely different physiological centres. These conclusions may be open to discussion, to new examinations. We are led back to the language, a fact which modifies the very nature of semiology. We are at the start of a reinterpretation of numerous concepts (all those having to do with the language). The notion of ‘the language’ itself must be wider; it must include more notions than have been attributed to it.

Notes 1 [Tr.: This and the following drawings are based on those which Jacqueline Authier-Revuz made in her lecture notes. The versions in Benveniste’s own notes have faded to near invisibility.]

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2 [Tr.: Benveniste’s example is the pair of homophones sein ‘breast’ and saint ‘holy’.] 3 [Tr.: French unité, literally ‘oneness’, corresponds to both English ‘unity’ and ‘unit’.] 4 [Tr.: This is a correction by Jean-Claude Coquet from what is in the French edition. Coquet’s notes of Benveniste’s lecture here read: ‘Nous savons qu’il y a eu une écriture syllabique employée au milieu du deuxième millénaire dans une partie de la Grèce (Mycènes).’] 5 [Tr.: The following two numbered sections, from ‘1) a correlation’ through ‘other semiological systems’ are indicated in the original French edition of 2012 as being from attendees’ notes, but are in fact from Benveniste’s own notes (correction by J.-C. Coquet).]

3

Final Lecture, Final Notes

1 December 1969: First Lecture This year we shall continue the study begun last year on the problems of meaning in a language, and the study of the writing system, which, amongst semiological systems, has long particularly occupied us. It becomes all the more necessary to pursue the study of meaning as this study is now in more favourable objective circumstances than in the past. We know that certain linguistic schools have long refused to accord any validity or even any interest to problems of meaning. Behaviourist notions prevailed everywhere and ‘meaning’ was identified with circumstance and reaction. We can refer to Bloomfield’s enunciations as transcribed in Hamp’s Glossary.1 It was not a matter of eliminating meaning, but it was recognised that we have no means of studying it, which in practical terms amounts to the same thing. Then came the conception of meaning as distribution. This period is over and the problem of meaning is now being attacked from several sides. We shall be referring to recent studies. There was for a long time an insistence on dismissing anything related to the signification of a language, in several ways, by omission or reduction: −− By omission: the belief that signification belongs to sciences other than linguistics is taught as scientific truth (American schools in particular, but not exclusively). We cannot analyse meaning so long as we have not found a system of linguistic analysis by which we

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could extract all the relationships which fall under it. In the process of linguistic analysis we exercise a process of breaking down into subsets increasingly restricted toward the smallest elements. These procedures are rigorous. In parallel it would be necessary to invent a system of analysing meaning, through a process of breaking it down toward its smallest elements. This conception is still recent; one is therefore tempted to admit helplessness and wish the problem away. −− By reduction: reduce the problem of meaning to particular dimen­ sions so as to be able to integrate it into a system of interpretation having a recognised validity. This is Bloomfield’s method: he does not at all ignore meaning, contrary to what has been said, but for him the only way to grasp it is to integrate it into an analysis of behaviour (behaviourism). Meaning is thus reduced to the formal reaction to stimuli: ‘Stimulus-reaction features [corresponding to forms] are meanings.’2 Hence for Bloomfield the meaning of a form would be the feature common to all the situations in which this form is used (however, the situation is subject to individual interpretation): ‘Any utterance can be fully described in terms of lexical and grammatical forms; we must remember only that the meaning cannot be defined in terms of our science’ (from Hamp’s Glossary). Through reduction no progress could be achieved. The psychologistic notion itself on which behaviourism was based, whilst important histori­ cally, has now been abandoned.

The problem of meaning will be: −− How do the different elements of a language signify? −− Is the ‘meaning’ of a word the ‘meaning’ of a proposition? −− Is the ‘meaning’ of a proposition the ‘meaning’ of a passage, of a chapter? There are obviously distinctions to be established.   The ‘meaning’ of a grammatical category? The ‘meaning’ of a case? of a verbal mood?

How do we grasp signification and where do we study it? Being an integral part of a language, it is distributed over each of the units of the language and is incorporated into each of them in such a way that they become signifying units, signs. Here we have a first observation.



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Another reason to pursue this study of meaning is that it has at least led us to formulate new problems. We set off from the observation that the whole language is informed and articulated by signification. It could not function otherwise and this is moreover its raison d’être; without which there would be, at one end, no thinking, at the other end, no society, hence no being,3 and no one to observe it. Such a view is utterly untenable on account of the blinding light of its nothingness, by which I mean that we could not face such an imagining: a humanity that did not have language and that would nevertheless be posited as existing. The whole of a language, at all levels, is informed, articulated by signi­ fication. One can study a language’s lexicon without being particularly preoccupied with its phonetics. Conversely, one can analyse the sounds without being occupied with the grammatical forms. To suppose that meaning is one of these specialisations is to mistake the principle of linguistic analysis. Meaning cannot be studied outside a language, nor a language outside meaning.

In reality, without signification, a language is no longer anything, not even a series of noises, for why would human beings make use of their throats if not to form sounds which have a meaning? Secondly, these signs are coordinated with each other, forming systems. A language is thus a sign system. This is the Saussurean conception. Saussure saw too that, with a language becoming one of the systems of signs, there are several sign systems and their study must be entrusted to a new science, semiology. We shall read the articles semiologie and signe in Engler’s Lexique.4 We must start from there in order to go further. The language as a sign system enters into a more vast set of sign systems. This is a new moment of analysis, that of the language’s integra­ tion made possible by the way of positioning the notion of sign within the language. In the history of modern thought, this is a fundamental step.

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But it is impossible to pass from the ‘sign’ to the ‘sentence’, impossible to make this distinction coincide with the Saussurean distinction of langue and parole, language and speech, because the sign is discontinuous and the sentence is continuous. The enunciation is not an accumulation of signs: the sentence is of another order of meaning. Nothing can be constructed with units. They cannot be linked together in these continuities that are sentences. The goal will be to determine the level and type of analysis to be applied to the sentence and the grammatical elements respectively. The notion of sign is in solidarity with the semiotic considerations. It actually implies – Saussure himself says so – the same level as gestures of politeness, etc. We need to draw out the consequences of this view, which are serious. It means, fundamentally, that the linguistic sign is put on the same plane as the non-signifying signs of other systems. And in effect, from this proceeds the Saussurean idea of the relative-oppositive entity. From this comes also my idea that it is sufficient for the sign to be recognised as belonging to the language, exactly as it is necessary and sufficient that the gesture be recognised. The notion of sign system is an entity of a scientific nature. Hence the problem is posed of the semiotic relationship amongst semiotic systems. How do we organise the relationships? 1. Engenderment relationship: valid between systems that are distinct but contemporaneous. This is an important feature; it signifies that there is a generating system and a generated system (the ordinary alphabet engenders the specific Braille alphabet). 2. Homology relationship: between two completely different systems, there are term-to-term correlations. Baudelaire had the intuition of this homology relationship in his poem Correspondances. Likewise Panofsky seeks to establish a homology relationship between Gothic architectural forms and the categories of scholastic thought.5 Another homology, the equivalences between writing and ritual gestures in China. 3. ‘Interpretance’ relationship (we must forge new concepts in order to advance): established between interpreting system and



Final Lecture, Final Notes 125 i­nterpreted system. From the point of view of a language, this rela­ tionship between systems is fundamental with regard to the other two. The language is posited insofar as it permits an interpretation to be articulated. The situation of languages is particular. No other system has at its disposal a ‘language’ in which it can formulate its own interpretations, whereas a language can in principle interpret everything, including itself. Two notions can be distinguished here, where up to now there has been only one when semiotics was spoken of: 1. that of formal semiotic structure given by the notions of ‘sign’ and ‘sign system’; 2. that of semiotic functioning, absent from the Saussurean conception of the language system. If the language can be a general interpretant, it is because it is not just a system in which signs are manipulated. It is the only system in which sentences can be formed.

Belonging to the semiotic are all systems consisting of oppositions in a closed set: classifications, taxonomies, signals, etc. By classifying the language as a system, by articulating it through the sign, Saussure – paradoxically – classified it amongst non-signifying systems, the elements of which signify nothing by themselves (sounds, colours, signals) and exist only in oppositions, oppositive entities, which is the case with phonemes, essentially non-signifying. To this system is opposed another system (is it really a system?) in the language:6 the semantic, the system of meaningfulness which is tied to the production and the enunciation of sentences.7 Thus we perceive a distinction between two worlds and two linguistics: −− the world of forms of opposition and distinction, the semiotic, which is applied to closed inventories, and depends on criteria of distinctiveness, more or less elaborated. To this world belong also morphological consonantal alternances, the distinction which appears in several Amerindian languages between two consonantal series for the categories

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of diminutive and augmentative (Karok, Wiyot, Wishram). Likewise for the intensive in Tarahumara. The distinction is in the things themselves; −− the other world is that of the meaning produced by the enunciation: the semantic. The Saussurean doctrine covers, under the species of languages, only the semiotisable part of the language, its material inventory. It does not apply to the language as production. But then what do we do with the formal categories which are necessities of expression, the necessary intermediaries or instruments of the language as enunciation and production? What do we do with cases, tenses, moods? Clearly these are distinctive and oppositive categories, and yet the language is necessarily moulded in these distinctions in order to produce its enunciations. Must a special status be reserved for them? The entire inflectional apparatus is in question here. This demands our most serious attention. Let us state at once that an utterance has meaning only in a given situation, to which it refers. It makes sense only in relation to the situation, but at the same time it configures this situation. We must therefore distinguish amongst the elements of the utterance. In reality, the problem of meaning is the problem of the language itself, and since the language appears to me as a moving landscape (it is the site of transformations) and since it is composed of different elements (verbs, nouns, etc.), meaning comes down to seeking the way of signifying that is proper to each of the elements in question. The overall study would be semiology.

Notes 1 [Tr.: The reference is to Eric P. Hamp (1920–2019), A Glossary of American Technical Linguistic Usage 1925–1950 (Utrecht and Antwerp: Spectrum, 1957).] 2 [Tr.: Leonard Bloomfield, ‘A set of postulates for the science of language’, Language 2 (1926), 153–64, 155.]



Final Lecture, Final Notes 127

3 [Tr.: The original of ‘hence no being’ (donc pas d’être) is in italics in the French edition of 2012, but should be in Roman script (correction by J.-C. Coquet, credited to Chloé Laplantine).] 4 [Tr.: Rudolf Engler, Lexique de la terminologie saussurienne (Utrecht: Het Spectrum, 1968).] 5 [Tr.: Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (Latrobe, PA: Archabbey Press, 1951). The French translation by Pierre Bourdieu appeared in 1967.] 6 [Tr.: The original of ‘in the language’ (dans la langue) was mistakenly left unitalicised in the French edition of 2012 (correction by J.-C. Coquet).] 7 [Tr.: ‘meaningfulness’ here translates le vouloir-dire, the nominalised infinitive form of veut dire (literally ‘want to say’), the usual French way of saying what someone or something ‘means’.]

Annex 1:

Bio-bibliography of Émile Benveniste Georges Redard

Editors’ Note Georges Redard (1922–2005) was a friend of Émile Benveniste’s, and became executor of his estate upon the death of his sister Carmelia Benveniste in 1979. Redard intended to publish a bio-bibliography of his former teacher in the École Pratique des Hautes Études. His draft text, typewritten and corrected by hand (Redard’s, we presume), is in the archives of the Collège de France (catalogue no. CDF 28/15), along with manuscripts and published work of Benveniste’s that Redard was using in preparing his text. Redard notes on the first page of the typescript: ‘Text of 1977, unrevised, not usable in its present form.’1 Georges Redard died on 24 January 2005. Madame Redard, in a letter of 25 March 2009, authorised us to publish this document, for which we express our gratitude. What follows is a long fragment of this text. We caution that, whilst we have not altered the text’s context, we have taken certain liberties with regard to its presentation – necessary to make it readable – notably at the level of punctuation, paragraph breaks, and footnotes that are much too numerous, much too long, and directed at too narrow a speciality to be relevant for the purposes of the present volume. Redard’s text has as its title simply ‘Émile Benveniste (1902– 1976)’. Was this the title of the whole work he planned to produce, or just of its opening part? We have no way of knowing. Nor can we determine what years the writing of this document spanned. J.-C. C. and I. F. 128



Annex 1 129

Émile Benveniste (1902–1976) by Georges Redard ‘Mr Benveniste, being unwell, was not able to give his lectures in 1969–1970.’ This footnote in the Annual Report of the École des Hautes Études for 1970–12 conceals the epilogue of a drama which began on 9 December 1956. That morning, at his work table, Émile Benveniste suffered a very violent heart attack. He was taken to the Foch Medical-Surgical Centre in Suresnes, where the infarction was pronounced critical. He recovered, thanks to his robust constitution, but it required an enforced rest. For him the hardest sacrifice: ‘The suddenness of the attack has interrupted all my activities [. . .]. The hardest thing is being forbidden to work. I am paying dearly for years of overwork’ (13 Dec. 1956).3 Slowly, he recovered: ‘I can only work two or three hours a day, but it’s enough to rekindle my hope’ (1 May 1957); ‘I am working a little, but really little. I’ll decide on this first trip4 what I can and can’t do. My entire lifestyle has to change’ (25 July 1957); ‘I’m a bit resurrected’ (2 Dec. 1957), ‘my ability to work is slowly coming back [. . .]. It’s still the case that my courses really tire me out, and travel remains out of the question’ (13 Jan. 1959).5 ‘Constrained to reorganise his life’,6 he cannot however resist the thrust of his renown. He is called upon from all sides – ‘linguistics is universal, but the poor linguist is scattered in the universe’ (17 Oct. 1954) – and there are tasks he cannot escape.7 The internal pressure is even more intense: his work is unfinished and the burden of what remains to be done oppresses him, sometimes to the point of despair. Receiving a photograph taken of him, he remarks: ‘I can’t completely identify this somewhat weary man with the one who, as I feel inside, would like to have another lifetime to fill’ (17 Oct. 1954), and the day of his sixtieth birthday is ‘the occasion of a solitary meditation on how little I’ve achieved of all I’d hoped to do’ (27 May 1962). As to the denouement, he had no illusions. Nose to the grindstone, he undertook a race against the clock that would end tragically. On Saturday 6 December 1969, Benveniste went to the office of his doctor, Dr Gaston Eliet, in the rue de la Tour in Passy,

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for a flu vaccination. Leaving the restaurant where he had lunch afterwards, he collapsed, struck down by an attack. The ambulance took him to the Hospital Ambroise-Paré in Boulogne-surSeine, where the first examination left little hope; his right side was paralysed and alternating hemiplegia had deprived him of speech. His comatose state led everyone to fear the worst, but he sometimes came out of it and these few glimmers revived hope. Some of his first visitors judged the cause to be lost and hardly ever visited again, convinced that Benveniste was already gone from our world. Others, who would be the faithful few, recognised on the contrary his progressive return to consciousness. On 24 December, Father Jean de Menasce, his friend and contemporary who had suffered a similar stroke in July, visited him and his conclusion was adamant: ‘he understands everything and can say nothing’.8 Professor Bernard Halpern, his colleague in the Collège de France and the Institut, doubted at first that he ‘can recover a part of his intellect’, but later was ‘convinced that he has kept his lucidity’ (25 Sep. 1975). For his part, Professor François Lhermitte, who treated him at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, was just as categorical: ‘You are right to speak of an extraordinary “presence”, as his intelligence and affectivity are intact.’9 The evidence is abundant, and it is not superfluous to offer some of the most striking examples here. At his bedside with Monsieur and Madame A. Minard in December 1973, we show him the proofs of his Problèmes de linguistique générale 2: he looks at the first page and quickly puts his finger on a typographical error.10 When the volume is ready for distribution, he adds to the list of press contacts the name of Julia Kristeva. He shows his sister an item from Le Monde devoted to the philosophy subjects given in the technical baccalaureate: the third subject took as its starting point a sentence from Problèmes de linguistique générale 1. On 31 March 1976 he manifests, with the same insistent gesture, his interest in an article in Le Monde in which Yvonne Rebeyrol recounts the discovery by archaeologists from the University of Rome of thousands of cuneiform tablets on the Tell Mardikh site, some fifty kilometres south of Aleppo. And still in February 1976 we can consult him with assurance11 on the title and disposition of three of his works



Annex 1 131

which need to be sent to the printer. Acquiescing with his head, disapproving with a broad gesture, he listens attentively, his face beaming or sombre depending on the news brought to him. Each letter is a joy to him, he smiles or even laughs heartily at jokes; he interrogates with his eyes, which have gone blue, eyes with which he must say everything and which cloud with despair when he does not succeed in making himself understood. Was no rehabilitation possible? The question is pointless, but it has been posed. Roman Jakobson notes, after a visit, that it is expressive aphasia and that the faculty of perception has therefore not been affected. As for writing, his early attempts produce some results,12 but Benveniste soon gives up and only on rare occasions will he again take up a pen.13 Physiotherapy has some success,14 but it comes too late15 and will then be all but abandoned.16 Here again it is Father de Menasce who saw things clearly. After his final visit, on 23 April 1970, he writes to Madame Mossé. Benveniste’s reluctance to write? Nothing could be more normal: ‘these humble things that have to be relearned from the ground up, that one carries out clumsily, and the learning of which one realises will not end, well, one has no wish to do them, especially at our age where the temptation to abdicate is strong’. The professor understands everything, that is certain: ‘only, it is the same Benveniste as always (except during the War, in Switzerland), shut up within himself, keeping his feelings secret and preferring not to bother others [. . .]. The healthy can’t imagine how deeply an intelligent man can be depressed and almost sluggish on account of not being able to make himself understood for very small things: a badly placed cushion, the heating, etc. . . ., which need an immediate solution. It exasperates me, who am an extravert and prone to anger, to an incredible point [. . .]. He closes himself in even more and this lack of reaction is, I think, misunderstood by the doctors who did not know him previously.’17 Stoic in his suffering, which we cannot measure, he will live nearly seven years in this bedridden existence. Since ‘chronic’ patients cannot be kept long in an ‘acute’ patient service, he is condemned to an odious wandering. Nine times he is transferred from one hospital to another, enduring these barracks of human decay, most of them dilapidated, noisy to the point of

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intolerability, in which certain patients give the impression of having come directly out of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. In the constant anguish, his sister attends him, day after day, with a self-denial which commands gratitude and respect.18 At the start of 1976, she learns of the existence of a care home in Versailles, Claire-Demeure (‘Bright-Home’), 12 rue Portede-Buc, run by the deaconesses of Reuilly. The director, Sister Danielle, receives her on 4 February: Yes, she will take in Émile Benveniste, permanently, as soon as a room becomes free. He enters there on 10 May, finally finding a setting and atmosphere worthy of him. But he will only touch his life’s haven: on 3 October at 2.45 a.m. he is struck down by an embolism of which there has been no previous symptom19 and death relieves him of his long wait. The morning of the 6th, some ten colleagues and friends come to pay him a last homage, and Marcel Bataillon, former administrator of the Collège de France, gives him, in a few very simple and poignant sentences, the last adieu. Émile Benveniste rests facing Claire-Demeure, in the Les Gonards cemetery which he viewed from his window. * Born in Aleppo, Syria, on 27 May 1902, Émile Benveniste came to Paris in 1913 to study in the Rabbinical School of France, at 9 rue Vauquelin. This was his good fortune – and ours. During World War I, the prominent linguist Sylvain Lévi volunteered to replace one of the teachers called up to serve in the armed forces. An ‘awakener of vocations’, Lévi soon discovered the young pupil’s exceptional gifts, and oriented him toward the Sorbonne. At sixteen, Benveniste had already drawn up the list of languages he needed to learn (a dozen!) and, at the age when most students were struggling with their Latin compositions, he was keen on comparative grammar: his copy of Meillet’s Introduction (4th edn, 1915) bears, with his signature, the date 1918 . . . In the Faculty of Letters, his favourite teacher was Joseph Vendryes,20 who initiated him, amongst others, into Celtic,21 and in 1919–20 Benveniste prepared, under Vendryes’s supervision, a study of the Old Latin sigmatic futures and subjunctives for his diploma of advanced studies in Classical languages.22



Annex 1 133

This was his first published work. At the same time he was attending Antoine Meillet’s lectures in the Collège de France23 and at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, where he also attended lectures on comparative grammar and Indo-Aryan languages by Jules Bloch, Louis Finot, Sylvain Lévi and, for Latin palaeography in 1919–20, Émile Chatelain. Starting in 1920 he worked under Louis Renot preparing for the agrégation in grammar, which he received in 1922, placing ninth. Until the end of the war, Meillet’s audience was very reduced in number, with Benveniste, Paul Demiéville (they sometimes accompanied their teacher together back to his home), Alf Sommerfelt ‘and a Russian, Ivanov, very gifted, who was doing Chinese’.24 With peace restored, the circle widened: alongside L. Renou and P. Chantraine were now René Fohalle, Jerzy Kuryłowicz and, above all, Marie-Louise Sjoestedt, who was the group’s centre, ‘companion in our work and our leisure [. . .], enlivening our meetings with her joyful vitality’. ‘Never did a group’, wrote Meillet, ‘include such a number of young people who I was so certain would soon be teacher-scholars. They had an open curiosity, a sharp critical sense, a taste for the real.’25 From the outset Meillet recognised in Benveniste a ‘precious recruit for linguistics’. Having affirmed, regarding the death in 1916 of the forty-year-old Robert Gauthiot, that ‘His work, which no one has been in a position to resume, remains interrupted’, Meillet now turned to his young disciple and entrusted him with the task of completing the Essai de grammaire sogdienne (Essay on Sogdian grammar) of which Gauthiot had managed to deliver only the first half in 1913.26 Benveniste finished it in 1924 and presented it as his diploma work to the École Pratique des Hautes Études.27 The student of the ‘Langues O’ (the National School of Living Oriental Languages)28 had already mastered the hardest of philologies: here he was ready to ‘advance in his career, marked out for greatness’.29 But he was not and would never be a specialist cooped up in ‘his’ science. His curiosity was commensurate with his talents. The Benveniste who, in 1923, reviews the Amesa Spanta of Bernhard Geiger is the same who, soon after, speaks with admiration of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,30 the same again who, with L. Aragon, A. Artaud, P. Brasseur, A. Breton, P. Éluard, Max Ernst,

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H. Jeanson, R. Queneau and others, signs the Surrealist manifesto ‘Revolution First and Forever’.31 Benveniste next spent some eighteen months in Puna (Poona), ancient centre of the Marathi Empire to the south-east of Mumbai, where he was tutor to children of the Tata family, prominent Parsi industrialists. Was he recommended to them by Sylvain Lévi?32 We know nothing about this stay, except that Benveniste completed his contribution to the Mélanges Vendryes whilst there and studied at close hand what he would later call ‘the smallest of the great religions’. From 1 May 1926 to 10 November 1927, he did his military service. Sent to Morocco, where he would remain until 25 February 1927, he was soon incorporated into a non-­ commissioned officers’ camp in Mazagran,33 of ephemeral existence but where he became friends with Michel Vieuchange, who would die of dysentery at Agadir in 1930, following an exploratory voyage in the Rio de Oro. Even before his demobilisation, starting on 1 November 1927, Benveniste was named director of studies in comparative grammar and Iranian in the École Pratique des Hautes Études. Thus had Michel Bréal opened the door to F. de Saussure, Saussure to Louis Duvau and to Meillet, who, in post since 1891 (when he too was twenty-five years old!), considered that it was ‘time to give way to a new man’. Taking advantage of the absence of their younger colleague – ‘and already their model’ – the members of the group described earlier prepared, unbeknownst to him, a small collection of studies which they presented to him on 5 April 1928,34 in L. Renou’s flat, following a banquet from which the menu has survived. It is very witty,35 with touching images. On 27 February 1936, he defended his theses, Origines de la formation des noms en indo-européen (Origins of noun formation in Indo-European, primary thesis) and Les infinitifs avestiques (The Avestan infinitives, secondary thesis, both  published Paris: Maisonneuve, 1935) and, only just having become doctor of letters, he acceded to the Collège de France. After having substituted for Meillet there from 1934 to 1936, he was elected on 26 July 1937 to replace him in the chair of comparative grammar which he would occupy until



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his stroke in 1969,36 with an interruption imposed on him by the war. He no doubt enlisted right at the start,37 but we do not know his whereabouts during the ‘Phoney War’ nor when the Western front is pushed back from the Somme to the Aisne (5–9 June 1940). Combat with Germany ended on 22 June. From the 20th, Benveniste was a prisoner in Frontstalag 190, in the Ardennes. He escaped on 21 November 1941 and reached Lyons, where he ‘discovered’ Pierre Emmanuel and was often the guest of Mr and Mme Minard. But the Wehrmacht invaded the so-called unoccupied southern zone on 11 November 1942, whilst the Italian Army installed itself in Nice and Corsica. Again it was necessary to flee. Thanks to Father Jean de Menasce, who maintained a secret correspondence with Benveniste ‘in Sogdian’,38 he managed to cross the Swiss border clandestinely, near Geneva. First interned in a camp for a short period, he found refuge in Fribourg where he was received by Father de Menasce, as well as by François Esseiva in his home at 8 avenue du Moléson, and at the Cantonal and University Library which Esseiva headed. In order to be useful, Benveniste worked there on a subject catalogue for linguistics, astonishing those around him with his vast knowledge and immense capacity for assimilating information. He certainly frequented the Anthropos Institute, established after the Anschluss of 1938 at Posieux-Froideville, near Fribourg, by Father Wilhelm Schmidt, who had been teaching at Fribourg since 1939. Amongst others, Jean Starobinski met him at Esseiva’s home: ‘Benveniste’s conversation fascinated me, and I recall regretting at that moment that I was having to memorise anatomy.’39 Much more open than usual, Benveniste nevertheless kept to himself, living quietly; his only slightly official appearance in Switzerland appears to have been two lectures given at Zurich, in the chair of Manu Leumann, during the winter semester 1943–4. When, after the liberation, he was able to resume his Paris teaching in the autumn of 1944, he had to face the harsh aftermath of his exile. His flat in the rue Méchain was occupied after having been looted. L. Renou and L. Robert had succeeded in putting the bulk of his library in a safe place, but all

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his ­documentation, all his manuscripts had vanished.40 On the material side, things were all right: he found a spacious dwelling at 1 rue Monticelli, very close to the Porte d’Orléans, where he would remain until he was hospitalised. Otherwise, stiffened against adversity, he got back to work, and one is reminded of what Gide wrote in his Journal on 8 May 1890: ‘It is necessary to work intensely in one go, and with nothing distracting you: that is the true way to the unity of the work’; or, even more, of what Benveniste wrote concerning Saussure and which was so perfectly valid of himself: ‘There is in every creator a certain exigency, hidden, permanent, which sustains and devours him, which guides his thoughts, shows him the task, stimulates his failures and calls no truce when he tries to escape from it.’41 Vacations too were rare. Certain indications suggest stays in Biarritz, in the hotel ‘Le Yacht’ at St-Raphaël in Savoy. As a young man, Benveniste roamed Brittany with a rucksack, along with his friend Yvonne Sjoestedt, Marie-Louise’s sister. With Dr J. Vieuchange, he went to Arosa in 1939 (learning to ski) and to the Kensington Hotel in Croix-Valmer in 1951. Most of the time he had to do without: ‘In fact the only vacation I have had, if you can call it that, was this week in Cambridge, with a few days spent in Burgundy with my old teacher Vendryes who, at nearly eighty, remains activity personified’ (17 Oct. 1954); ‘I have not managed to leave Paris, although I need rest’ (4 Apr. 1956); ‘try, better than I have done, to rest when necessary’ (25 Apr. 1962) . . . Hardly anything apart from scholarly meetings and field work took him away from his work table. Benveniste took part in all the International Congresses of Linguists from 1931 to 1967 (apart from the 5th, which was held in Brussels on 2 September 1939, on the eve of the declaration of war) – all too infrequent occasions to hear him treat the most diverse subjects in the most savoury manner. At the ParkOtel of Istanbul, the evening of 16 September 1951, he spoke to the little circle of which he was ‘president’, of the child-king in the Orient, who can steal fruit from a stall with impunity but must soon assume adult responsibilities; then, relating the recent controversy over the Board of Regents of the University of California requiring all its employees to sign an oath of loyalty to the state constitution and denying membership in the



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Communist Party or any other organisation advocating overthrow of the government, he remarked with a mischievous smile that there was nothing exceptional about it: ‘Certain citizens of the United States are having their visas for travel to Europe refused without being given a reason for it. This recalls the criterion formerly used in Australia to force back immigrants judged undesirable even though they fulfilled all the requirements: they were asked to read and translate an absolutely foreign text – for a Greek, a page of Icelandic or Hungarian. You cannot translate? We’re sorry . . . Dangerous childishness.’ Amongst other meetings held abroad in which Benveniste took an active part must be mentioned the Congress of Etruscology in Florence in 1928, the two colloquia organised by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei on The Christian Orient in the History of Civilisation (Rome and Florence, 31 March–4 April 1963) and on Persia and the Greco-Roman World (Rome, 11–14 April 1965); the 12th Summer Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 28–9 July 1950) where he moreover taught in the LSA Summer Institute;42 the symposium on Directions for Historical Linguistics held on 29 and 30 April 1966 by the Linguistics Department of the University of Texas at Austin; the first International Symposium of Semiotics at Warsaw, 25–30 August 1968, which he opened with a paper on ‘The distinction between the semiotic and the semantic’;43 the Olivetti International Conference (Milan, 14–17 Oct. 1968), which had as its theme Languages in Society and in Technology; and finally – this was to be his last voyage44 – the colloquium organised in Rome by the International Centre of Humanist Studies and by the Institute of Philosophical Studies of Rome (5–11 January 1969). Field research led Benveniste first to Iran and Afghanistan, then to Alaska. Appointed cultural envoy by the Bureau of Cultural Relations, he left for Persia in the spring of 1947. He did research in Fars province, studying first of all the dialect of Sivand, to the north-east of Shiraz, then in Mazandaran province, on the shores of the Caspian Sea; and with the Norwegian linguist Georg Morgenstierne (1892–1978), in the village of Semnan, east of Tehran (Semnani and Sorkhei languages). Near mid-May, he travelled to Kabul. Accompanied by Mohammad

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Nabi Kohzâd, he made a first voyage, from 14 to 24 June, in the valleys of Chotor and Pachagan to study Parachi. On 5 July he left for the far north, reaching Fayzabad, the capital of Badakhshan, on the 12th (an automobile breakdown obliged the travellers to pursue their route in a truck, then on horseback). The very next day the horsemen were already heading toward Baharak and on the 23rd they reached the little town of Ishkashim, then on the 26th they went to Zebak, on the edge of the Wakhan, and on the 30th headed back toward Fayzabad, which they entered a little before dawn on the 1st of August. They returned via Khanabad, which they left on the 6th, arriving at Kabul early on the morning of 7 August. Their trove of data was all the more impressive for having been collected, under difficult conditions, in a few days of work. It concerns five Pamir languages: Shugni, Ishkashmi, Sanglechi, Wakhi and Munji. In total it fills some 200 pages composed from notebooks and is nearly ready for print.45 But Benveniste was more and more desirous of ‘leaving’ IndoEuropean and studying at first hand a language in which the categories familiar to us are completely lacking, with a structure that defies traditional classifications and demands a total remaking of linguistic notions. He set his sights on a domain imperfectly known in certain respects, practically unknown in others, which extends on the west coast of North America from the Queen Charlotte Islands to the interior of Alaska.46 The undertaking was carried out in two stages. In 1952, the material conditions being favourable, he studied two languages of the Na-Dene (Athabaskan) family:47 Haida and Tlingit, spoken principally in the Queen Charlotte archipelago and on the southern coast of Alaska, but heading for extinction. On the job at the beginning of July and going from south to north, he stayed successively in the villages of Skidegate and Masset in British Columbia,48 then in Ketchikan, a fishing port in the south of Revillagigedo Island, Alaska, where he traced the dialect of Kasaan, which appears to be a variant of Skidegate. On 7 September, he took a plane to Seattle and Vancouver, from where the Canadian Pacific Railway took him in two days (16–17 September) to Winnipeg, the capital of Manitoba and the great Canadian market centre for wheat. He returned to



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Paris toward mid-October and spoke to us, in December, with evident pleasure, of this first stay, difficult and laborious as it was,49 as can be seen from his letter to Pierre Chantraine from Skidegate, 11 July: I’ve spent a week now in the Queen Charlotte Islands, off British Columbia, in the middle of a village inhabited exclusively by Haida Indians. It’s a strange sensation to live amongst these fishermen, on a beachfront that opens to the sea, backed by thick forests. For several days the sky, previously morose and rainy, has been resplendent with a Mediterranean light, and the landscape is an enchantment. I think I’m the first white man to have stayed here, and not without difficulty. But don’t imagine a primitive population. These are fishermen whose life and culture are hardly different from those of whites of similar condition. They live in small wooden chalets, fish on motor boats, and speak only English, at least the young. I work every day with some old folk, recording in small bits and trying to comprehend this strange language. I’m beginning to hear the sounds and this is already progress. In a few days I’ll go to another village in the far north of the island [he left on 17 July for Masset], to complete my documentation. The material life of an isolated white man, in these nearly uninhabited isles, poses numerous problems at every moment, and it’s a big inconvenience for my work. In this season, it would be a delightful stay if there were the most rudimentary of hotels here. And it’s the same nearly everywhere along the coast, where there is so much to see and do.

In 1953 he went again, this time benefitting from the aid of the Rockefeller Foundation, which accepted him into its exchange visitor programme. Arriving in New York on 16 June, he reached Vancouver and at once continued his investigations of the year before, still progressing northward. The best thing is to give here, with some notes, the essence of the typewritten report which he sent on 5 February 1954 to Edward F. D’Arms, Associate Director of the Rockefeller Foundation (Division of Humanities): I first studied, between mid-June and the end of July, the language of the Tlingit Indians, first at Juneau, then to the north in the region

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of Haines and Klukwan. It may be useful to point out that the Tlingit have the reputation of being the most resistant to investigation amongst the Alaskan Indians. Their obstinate refusal to give any complete information about their language and traditions has discouraged many ethnographers (there are some very recent examples). The strongest resistance is situated around Klukwan, which is like a museum of ancient customs. Now it is precisely with informants from this region that I have worked constantly. I have had the good fortune of getting them to accept my questions and of obtaining precious information from them on the subjects which interested me. At Klukwan I was even able to visit the ceremonial houses of several clans and see the ritual objects and masks which are not shown to outsiders. My daily work has been devoted above all to the language. The materials I have gathered are of interest in several respects.   I have amassed a large quantity of lexical data, particularly in relation to the principal aspects of the culture. A cleavage can be noted between at least two series of designations: the terms of daily life, and the ceremonial terms, which must not be used outside of appropriate circumstances. Another instructive experience has been obtaining the native version of certain fundamental institutions such as the potlatch, which have been so abundantly commented upon by ethnologists. By analysing the terms which denote the institution and by having the informants comment on them, I have been able to form from these cultural facts a more rational and less ‘exotic’ understanding than what is generally accepted today.   One of the characteristics of the language in question is to express by lexical means certain categories which for us are grammatical. Thus what we call the singular–plural distinction is realised in Tlingit by distinct terms: two different verbs are used for ‘go’ or ‘sleep’ etc., the one for ‘one person goes, sleeps etc.’, the other for ‘several people go, sleep etc.’; one verb signifies ‘kill (one animal)’, another ‘kill (several animals)’. This feature has important and wide-reaching grammatical consequences.   Interesting facts have also been noted relating to the structure of verbal forms, which are always complex, and composed of several morphemes, each of which has a constant role. It is delicate work to analyse the semantic structure of a notion as simple for us as



Annex 1 141 ‘weigh’ or ‘cut’ or ‘suffer’ when it is expressed through a combination of morphemes where the root has only a rather vague meaning. The variety of material will allow a better definition of the formal and semantic relationships amongst the elements of the verbal forms, which are the most important and most difficult part of the morphology.   I have also been able to note useful indications regarding the distribution of clans as well as the relations and contacts of the Tlingit with the other Indian peoples of the coast and the interior. Certain religious terms and also many animal names are certainly borrowings from other languages and attest to ancient relationships.   At the start of August [Sunday the 2nd], I went from HainesKlukwan to Skagway, then to Whitehorse (Yukon Territory, Canada).50 I was in the land of the Na-Dene Indians, whose way of life and culture are entirely different, despite some analogies due perhaps to contacts with the Tlingit. These Indians live in very weak groups or bands and are above all hunters and fishermen, settling near rivers and lakes in pursuit of game. Their dispersion over an immense territory which covers both American Alaska and the Canadian province of the Yukon has produced a great variety of languages which are still practically unknown.   I studied one of these languages in one of the villages of the Yukon (Kluane), near the Alaska Highway. Then I went to Fairbanks, and from there almost immediately to Fort Yukon (Alaska) where I worked until the start of September.   Fort Yukon is situated a bit above the Arctic Circle and constitutes the northernmost Indian agglomeration and also the most numerous of northern Alaska (more than 500 Indians). No linguist had yet visited this region. There again I had the good fortune to find serious and well-disposed informants with whom I worked intensively. The experience was completely new and very difficult. I forced myself to gather as many data as possible on both the language, which has a complicated structure, and on this people’s historic traditions. These Indians seem to have preserved memories of their ancient migrations eastward from the coast, going up the Yukon River. They also have an interesting nomenclature for other tribes and for their distribution. Moreover, their way of life has multiplied the denominations of animals in their language. I have assembled a rather rich vocabulary of animal life which can be

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published soon.51 But it is especially the language’s structure that has caught my attention. The language of Fort Yukon is related to that of the great Na-Dene family which extends all the way to the south of the United States in the form of Navajo. The new data I have recorded will contribute to establishing the exact relationships amongst the diverse linguistic groups swarming between Alaska and Arizona. To the extent that it is possible to restore the structure of this family, we can examine the possible relatedness of this language with Tlingit and with Haida.   During the first days of September, to have at least an idea of a region and a culture different from the one I had just studied, I made a short visit to the Eskimos of the Bering Sea, in the localities of Kotzebue and Nome. Although this visit lasted only a few days, I had a very vivid impression of the remarkable capacities of this people, who have managed to retain their original character, and I learned of their contacts with the Indians of the Lower Yukon, who have been influenced by them. There too I noticed certain linguistic particularities.   During this whole summer I have hardly let a day pass without working with one or another of my informants. It was necessary to make the most of the chance I had to pursue my investigations in a land so little known, and to record as much as possible. Only now can I study and elaborate this mass of materials with a view to the publications I am preparing [. . .].   In the conversations which I had in Fairbanks, in Seattle and also in my correspondence with friends from Vancouver, I tried to suggest a plan for an extensive exploration of the whole north-west region undertaken by a pool of American and Canadian universities of the Pacific (Alaska, Washington, British Columbia), for an in-depth survey of the languages of the most original Indian cultures which exist in North America, before they disappear. The idea has been favourably received. But the initiative for realising it must come from America itself.   My experience has shown me in any case that there is just time to accomplish this investigation. A few years from now the conditions will have changed completely, with the rapid population growth and industrialisation of Alaska, the development of roads and railways in the interior, and the progress in education and acculturation amongst the Indians.



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On 11 September, Benveniste left Juneau for Seattle, then reached New York, where he embarked on 3 October on the SS United States. Starting in December, he devoted one of his courses in the Collège de France to the Indian languages of Alaska – the first time this was a subject of teaching in France. Multiple obligations and other projects unfortunately prevented him from publishing the materials which he gathered: eight thick black notebooks devoted to Tlingit, three to the language of the Yukon. One of the latter contains the ‘notes taken on 6 August 1953 at Champagne, Yukon Territory, copied from my little brown notebook on 11 September in the plane from Juneau to Seattle to occupy the five-hour flight, and in dear memory of my Alaskan trips’. This moving remark we may complement with the isolated account in his notebooks of his stay in Skagway and Whitehorse: Wednesday 5 August 53. Departed with regret Haines and the so welcoming Hotel Hälsingland in Port Chilkoot on Sunday morning 2 August. A quarter of an hour later, I was landing in Skagway. In this dead town, deader still on a Sunday, I spent a solitary day, intoxicated with a melancholy that the incessant wind seemed to deepen and calm at the same time. The gray weather, the distant charm of a past which still floats in faded images on this 1900-style street, the Gold Rush atmosphere which impregnates the old structure of the Pullen House Hotel, the charming bloom of trees and gardens in the deserted paths, the tender green of the willows, the slow promenade to the old cemetery across the railroad track, where I was alone amongst the tombs of pioneers at the foot of a noisily cascading waterfall, it did not occur to me that this was like an adieu to Alaska and the sea. I shall long retain these images.   The next morning, Monday, I took the little train for Whitehorse. After a slow climb, along slopes covered in mist, we emerged into a radiant sky, from which a brilliant sun descended. I felt happily intoxicated with this long-forgotten warmth. Arrived late into Whitehorse, settled in the Hotel Regina, in a small room. My first impression of Whitehorse: an immense sky where a blinding sun was blazing, stretches of wooden shacks planted here and there, a suffocating dust raised in thick whirlpools by trucks which judder

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through avenues that are more like tracks, the warmth of the high plateau, some very brown Indians: I thought myself in Persia on a pure and torrid day. A hot dry wind desiccates the skin. I discover that this ‘metropolis of the Yukon’ has the stiffness and the desperate look of cities where the white man is still a camper. There are not five stone buildings. Very broad avenues of broken ground, wider still for being bordered by isolated shacks, crumbling huts, vague spaces, and everywhere columns of dust rising and whirling. Ramshackle warehouses, worm-eaten wooden hovels, a Main Street of just a hundred metres and on each side ten shabby wooden shops, only the White Horse Inn and a bank are built of stone, here then is this famous Whitehorse. [. . .] Tuesday morning, I get information on how to get out as soon as possible from this sterile place. I learn that the steamer for Dawson will not leave for some ten hours and no one knows precisely when, that Dawson is only accessible from Whitehorse by air twice a week [. . .], and finally that the Alaska Highway bus left that morning at 7 and that there will not be another until Thursday. I am enraged by the idea that I may have to spend two days idle here. I buy a ticket for Burwash Landing on the Thursday bus.   Not knowing quite what to do, I go to the Indian Affairs office. A lady with little information, but nice, tells me that the head of the Bureau, Sheek, is in Vancouver taking a summer course in anthropology with Hawthorn!52 More bad luck. [. . .] At the end of the afternoon I was on the banks of the Yukon, and there the intense poetry of the river with its chalky banks, flowing through the sloping foliage with a vivid and powerful motion, slowly penetrated me and erased the sullen mood which had invaded me. It seems childish to get impatient over two lost days, but these weeks count so much for me that I want them all to be like the one I spent in Haines, working from morning to night gathering forms and sentences, intoxicated with this tiring and novel work. [. . .] I am beginning to like this plateau (my altimeter says 680 m), the dry and warm air, the banks covered with luxuriant vegetation, the limpid and burning air through which my gaze carries me far away. I don’t know why I believe myself to be in Central Asia, on the banks of the Oxus, in some corner of northern Afghanistan; these memories of my hikes mingle with my present impressions and I feel their poignancy. [. . .] I still however have a vague regret over not having seen



Annex 1 145 Dawson. We shall see whether it persists once I have experienced Burwash and Tanacross; and if I succeed in reaching Fort Yukon, it will be erased.

* Disdainful of superficial publicity and false pretences, Benveniste shied away from facile glorification. Hence the honours which did befall him, in great numbers, were the well-earned recognition of his brilliant achievements. Forty-seven years after the Étrennes, two volumes of homages were dedicated to him: the Mélanges linguistiques, which were bestowed on him at Créteil on the afternoon of 6 June 1975 by the officers of the Société de linguistique de Paris,53 ‘in a ceremony that was both moving and marked by the greatest simplicity’,54 and the volume Langue, discours, société (Language, discourse, society),55 in which the presence, alongside linguists, of specialists in anthropology, mythology, psychoanalysis and literary theory attests to the extent of his influence. At its meeting of 14 March 1958, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres decided to award him the Alfred Dutens Prize for the entirety of his work.56 This was but a prelude: should he not be a member of the Académie? He was certainly resistant to the hoary tradition of choosing members by personal visits, but Mr Louis Robert was vigorously defending the new procedure of direct election. Benveniste would be its first beneficiary:57 on 27 May 1960, he was elected to the seat left vacant by the death of Joseph Vendryes on 30 January,58 and on 8 July, the president Marcel Bataillon welcomed him, inviting him ‘to take his place amongst his confreres and to join in their work’. He would not fail to do so, and his chair, next to that of Paul Demiéville, was rarely empty. Of his papers, the Bureau selected that of 12 October 1962 to be read at the annual public session on 23 November. He was appointed to the Interacademic Commission of the Prix Volney, and the Commission for drawing up the list of French scholars to be proposed for the title of correspondent of the Scientific Council of the French School of the Far East. And if he recused himself in the vice-presidential election of 17 December 1965, it was because he reckoned, quite rightly, that he had sacrificed enough of his time to administrative tasks.

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Mention must be made here of his devotion to the work and the interests of two societies which naturally drew his preference: the Société de linguistique and the Société Asiatique. Presented to the first of these on 17 January 1920 by Antoine Meillet and Joseph Vendryes, he was elected as a member on 18 February. From that day until 15 March 1969,59 his attendance was assiduous.60 On 7 December 1929 he was named Member of the Finance Committee and continued as such until the war; on 19 December 1936, he joined the Publication Committee; on 3 February 1945, he was elected Adjunct Secretary, but already assumed de facto the role of Secretary, hence of editor of the Bulletin,61 a role which was officially conferred on him on 20 December 1958 and in which he would have to be replaced on 19 December 1970.62 In the Mémoires and the Bulletin, he published sixty-five articles and, from 1936, with few exceptions, all his book reviews. Reading the minutes of the meetings, one is struck by the number and the importance of his interventions, to say nothing of his own papers. Everyone awaited his judgement, difficult to predict,63 which always got to the heart of the matter: how many meetings were illuminated by the brilliance of his thinking! For the Société Asiatique he did much as well. Elected on 13 May 1921 upon presentation by Meillet and Jules Bloch, he became Secretary as early as 14 June 1928, replacing Louis Finot, and remained in that role until June 1947. Although he did not attend the meetings of 1921–2, undoubtedly too occupied with preparing for the agrégation, he was regularly present starting in 1923, except when the circumstances noted earlier meant that he was away from Paris. From 1932 to 1949 he presented nine papers. But starting in 1953, always short of time and invited elsewhere – he would be President of the Association for the Encouragement of Greek Studies in 1954–564 – he gave up attending the meetings of the Société Asiatique in the rue de Seine and made his final appearance at the General Assembly on 15 June 1961. He nonetheless pursued his collaboration with the Journal asiatique, to which he would contribute thirty articles and twenty-nine reviews. His work is so vast and diverse that trying to summarise it in a few pages is a formidable and risky task. We therefore resign



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ourselves from the start ‘to incurring the double reproach of being inferior and incomplete’.65 At first glance, one discerns three domains of activity: IndoEuropean, Iranian, general linguistics. They have, without question, benefitted from preferential treatment, but the work could not be contained within this tripartition. In order to grasp the principle which animates it and constitutes it, we must proceed first with an inventory, even if it needs to be dry and monotonous, of the writings which gravitate at greater or lesser distance around these major themes. Benveniste was without doubt one of the last comparativists capable of covering the whole of the Indo-European domain. But if all the consonances of the symphony were familiar to him, he also managed the still rarer feat of exploring each of the principal languages of this group. Already in his diploma thesis of 1922, he shows that comparison, although always present, is not the only route to the solution of a problem and that it is often necessary to seek the elements of an explanation inside the language itself. Very early on he took an interest in Hittite – which Meillet virtually neglected. For him ‘the period of scepticism and hypercriticism is now over’ and this language can deliver up much more than what has been drawn from it heretofore. Numerous articles, ranging over thirty years (1932–62), testify to the continuity of his research. It uncovers no philological novelties or unpublished material but, founded on the most well-­established facts, clarifies many problems of phonetics, morphology, vocabulary and syntax. Revised, expanded and augmented with unpublished work, several of these studies constitute the 1962 volume Hittite et indo-européen, in which Benveniste aims on the one hand to increase the contribution of Hittite to the restitution of a very ancient phase of Indo-European, and on the other, brings to light certain important aspects of this Hittite heritage. [. . .] To Tokharian, which already figures in his diploma thesis and will be constantly called to testify, Benveniste devoted just one article in its own right, but a landmark article, in which he seeks to define its dialectal position: it is the ‘ancient member of a prehistoric group (to which Hittite possibly belongs as well)

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bordering Baltic and Slavic on one side, Greek, Armenian and Thraco-Phrygian on another’ – a conclusion which, once again, leads much further since the geographic projection of the results indicates the region of the Eurasian Steppe extending from the area south-east of Russia to the Urals, in other words, framing the entirety of the Indo-European community. Of the Indic languages, Benveniste had a perfect knowledge,66 as is necessary for a comparativist and an Iranianist, but he nearly always considered them within the Indo-Iranian frame. [. . .] Faithful to Meillet’s teaching, Benveniste gave a large place to Armenian in his works, studying in turn the consonant mutation, the transitive and intransitive in the construction of the participle. [. . .] Above all, he added considerably to the inventory of Iranian borrowings, begun by Heinrich Hübschmann, Meillet and Gauthiot, borrowings which belong mainly to the Arsacid period and for which he specifies the dialectal source on each occasion [. . .]. As in other sectors, Benveniste was interested here in compounds, whether it had to do with a particular formation [. . .] or with the process itself, which became widespread and raises delicate questions, such as the translation of biblical Greek compounds, the analysis of which led him to define the place of compounding in the structure of the language and the function it fulfilled. In his writings concerning Greek, pride of place goes to vocabulary. [. . .] Taken on magisterially in his study of the sigmatic futures and subjunctives, Latin morphology was the object of at least two other studies of his [. . .]. But here as with Greek, his efforts bore primarily on the lexicon. [. . .] The ‘Latin’ research of Benveniste naturally extended to French. He studied borrowings from English such as international and sténographie, Latinisms such as presqu’île (peninsula), convoler (marry), normal, larve (larva), scientifique etc. [. . .]. His lexicological investigations blossom with the abundance of materials put to work and his continual ability to integrate the singular fact into a coherent ensemble, qualities which shine in his contribution to the history of ‘civilisation’ or in the way he untangles the relations between amenuiser (dwindle, whittle) and menuisier (carpenter). [. . .] French serves as the springboard for reflections



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and definitions which extend beyond it: his examination of a particular language opens into a general linguistic problem. This is an essential procedure in Benveniste’s work. Celtic, whilst it is brought into the comparison whenever its testimony matters, gave rise to only two lexicographic notes. His articles on Germanic are few as well, and almost all relate to a wider problem which he treats as such elsewhere. [. . .] Three articles relate to Baltic and belong to the period when he was preparing the Origines (1932–5). [. . .] Finally, regarding Slavic, Benveniste teaches once again that vocabulary is not a homogeneous ensemble. Direct borrowings must be carefully distinguished from [. . .] semantic calques [. . .] and shared inheritances of which some precious examples survive. But, as we said, in this long cortege, it is to Iranian that Benveniste devoted the ‘lion’s share’.

Notes   1 This bio-bibliography by Redard is mentioned by Françoise Bader in her article ‘Une anamnèse littéraire d’É. Benveniste’, Incontri Linguistici, no. 22, Rome, 1999, p. 53 (‘[. . .] I was able to meet Georges Redard, author of a still unpublished biography of É. Benveniste’).   2 4th Section, Paris, 1971, p. 651. In fact Benveniste had begun his lectures in November [Tr.: actually on 1 December 1969]. One of the attendees, Fr. Hohenauer, tells me that he gave his last lecture sitting down: exceptional behaviour that testifies to his great fatigue. [Tr.: ‘École des Hautes Études’ is a shortened version of the name of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE).]   3 The citations followed by a date are extracted from letters from Benveniste to the author over a quarter of a century. To overwork should probably be added the after-effects of an illness contracted in Afghanistan in 1947: ‘I’ve suffered an attack of malaria, which apparently gets worse the longer it lingers, and it’s left me very anaemic’ (23 Nov. 1948).   4 He will be going, by train and boat (air travel is forbidden to him) to the Eighth International Congress of Linguists in Oslo, 9 Aug. 1957.

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  5 ‘The immobile traveller I’ve become’, he will still write on 17 Jan. 1965.   6 ‘There always comes a moment when one is constrained to reorganise one’s life. I’m speaking from experience’ (6 June 1967).   7 ‘Writing for particular events absorbs all my time’ (4 Apr. 1956); ‘I’ve had to take on the responsibility of directing our Institute of Iranian Studies, following the death of Massignon’ (19 Jan. 1963).   8 Letter from Father Jean de Menasce to the widow of the linguist Fernand Mossé (26 Dec. 1969) which concludes: ‘Very painful in spite of everything, this doubly mute meeting.’   9 Letter of François Lhermitte (4 Feb. 1974). This did not prevent Jacques Cellard from referring, in an article in Le Monde (no. 520, 21 Apr. 1975, p. 15), to ‘a physically and intellectually inexorable illness’. Two requests for a correction remained unanswered; not until the issues of 8, 9 and 10 June 1975 do we find Carmelia Benveniste’s accurate observation: ‘As physically challenged by the illness as he is, my brother remains present, interested in the work of his colleagues and former students and in everything near and far that attaches him to the domains of the heart and the mind.’ 10 His vision had long been very poor: ‘my eyes are not coordinated, the right-hand page inserts itself into the left and I have trouble going from one line to the next when I read’. 11 Through a series of questions posed in such a way that they require only a yes/no answer. 12 Thanks especially to the advice given by Father de Menasce and to the patience of Mesdames Minard and Mossé. 13 The last postcard received from him, on 10 Oct. 1972, in response to a letter written from Asia Minor, says, in capital letters: ‘Pergamon, Ismir, what lovely memories. A bientôt. Émile Benveniste.’ 14 At the Salpêtrière, Benveniste takes a few steps in the corridor each day with the help of a nurse, and even walks down the stairs. 15 Father de Menasce to Madame Mossé, 14 Jan. 1970: ‘It seems very strange to me that they have not yet begun a mobilisation of the paralysed limbs. In my own case, when I had my hemiplegia ten years ago, rehabilitation started within the week, although it took more than two months before the start of any voluntary movement. It is true that I had been taken to the nearest hospital,



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which happened to be the Cantonal Hospital of Lucerne and where I was cared for admirably.’ 16 For lack of qualified personnel? According to Mr Gabriel Pallex, Director General of Public Assistance, there were nineteen licensed physiotherapists at the Albert Chenevier Hospital of Créteil – 823 beds in total, spread over some ten independent pavilions, including the Clovis Vincent Pavilion in which Benveniste spent more than two years (Le Monde, 7 Aug. 1974, p. 10). 17 Letter of 24 Apr. 1970. 18 ‘I have often thought of this almost superhuman effort that Mademoiselle Benveniste imposes on herself in order to go to see her brother every day, and in those conditions’ (Letter of Prof. B. Halpern, 12 Feb. 1976). 19 The evening before, his sister and his next most faithful visitor, Mr Djafar Moïnfar, had left him happy and in an almost jovial mood. 20 This ‘teacher who is dear to him’ also gave him his love of walking: ‘He would take his students on long hikes in the Forest of Fontainebleau.’ 21 His course notes from ‘Explication of Welsh Texts’ (1919–20) are archived in the BnF. 22 The diploma bears the date 21 June 1920, with, amongst others, the signature of the dean, Ferdinand Brunot. 23 Two notebooks are archived in the BnF: ‘Indo-European Origins of the Greek Sentence’ (1919–20) and ‘Homeric Language’ (1920–1). 24 Letter of Paul Demiéville (26 Nov. 1976) who, having left for Asia at the end of 1919, met Ivanov ‘in 1920 in Peking, whence he was later recalled to the USSR and executed’. [Tr.: Paul Demiéville (1894–1979) would become a pre-eminent Sinologist and head of the 4th Section of the EPHE, which included languages and linguistics.] 25 Antoine Meillet, ‘Avant-propos’, Étrennes de linguistique offertes par quelques amis à É. Benveniste (Paris: Geuthner, 1928), pp. v–vi. 26 Devoted to phonetics, it would not appear until 1923. In a PS to his Preface (p. vi, dated 28 Dec. 1922), Meillet announced that ‘a young Iranianist, Mr É. Benveniste, is at work writing’ the ­morphology section.

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27 Yearbook of the EPHE, 4th Section, 1923–4, p. 77, where we also learn that ‘E. B. has undertaken a doctoral thesis on an Iranian subject’ (might this already be his secondary thesis of 1935?). The work did not appear until 1929, ‘in part because of the author’s prolonged absence, but above all as the result of repeated failures by the printer’. 28 He was enrolled in the École Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes in 1922–3 and 1923–4. 29 As Benveniste wrote concerning Ferdinand de Saussure. 30 [Tr.: Bernhard Geiger’s (1881–1964) study of the Amesha Spenta, the divine immortals of Zoroastrianism, is Die Amaša Spantas: Ihr Wesen und ihre ursprungliche Bedeutung (Vienna: A. Hölder, 1916). Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (Leipzig: Insel, 1910) is the only novel by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926); its French translation, Les cahiers de Malte Laurids Brigge, by Maurice Betz, appeared in 1926.] 31 La Révolution surréaliste 5, 1925: ‘It is our rejection of every granted law, our hope in young, underground forces capable of shaking up History, breaking the derisory linkage of facts which makes us turn our eyes toward Asia [. . .]. It is the Mongols’ turn to camp on our squares’. The attraction of the Orient is not the only issue: the signatories reject ‘the abject horizon-blue cape’ (uniform of World War I) and support the Action Committee against the War in Morocco. See Maurice Nadeau, Histoire du surréalisme (Paris: Seuil, 2 vols, 1946–8), vol. 1, pp. 297–300; vol. 2, pp. 37–41. 32 Lévi had gone to India in October 1897 and again in November 1921. 33 A port, originally Portuguese, in the province of Casablanca, now Al-Djadida. 34 Étrennes de linguistique offertes par quelques amis à É. Benveniste, with a preface by Meillet. 35 Mme Chantraine has kindly given it to us: ‘Preface: Zakouski – Appetisers in the injunctive – Vedic salmon trout – Fillet Irish style – Dorian asparagus – Vocabulary ice cream – Cheese – Petits fours – Fruits’ served with ‘Chablis Première 1919, Château Léoville 1922, Veuve Clicquot Carte d’Or, Henri Goulet 1911’. Through my friend O. Masson I learned of a copy now belonging to the Semiticist Maurice Sznycer, which bears on the cover page: ‘To myself, 5 April 1928, É. Benveniste’, then the signatures



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of J. and L. Renou, ‘loyal and legitimate friend’ J. Kuryłowicz, R. Fohalle and finally that of P. Chantraine, which is preceded by ‘To yourself’. Bought on the bookstalls along the quays of the Seine, the volume must have been stolen during the wartime looting of Benveniste’s flat. 36 Officially until 27 May 1972. His sister Carmelia Benveniste represented him at the ceremony on 22 November of that year in which Mr Étienne Wolff, administrator of the Collège, said in his eulogy: ‘In the view of the greatest specialists, he has been the greatest amongst them; his name is surrounded with a universal veneration.’ 37 In the Yearbook of the EPHE 1940–1 and 1941–2 (Melun: EPHE, 1943), then 1942–3 and 1943–4 (ibid., 1945), he figures amongst the directors of studies ‘who are not professing’. 38 Jean de Menasce, born in Alexandria on 24 December 1902, died in Paris on 24 November 1973, was initiated into Pahlevi by Benveniste at the École des Hautes Études from 1937 until 1939. He was then appointed as Professor of the History of Religions and Missiology at the University of Fribourg. He returned to Paris at the end of 1948 and became director of studies in the École des Hautes Études. He dedicated his edition of the Skand-Gumanik Vicar (Fribourg: Éditions de la Librairie d’Université, 1945) to his ‘teacher and friend’ Benveniste. 39 Before finishing his studies in literature in 1942, Starobinski began studying medicine, whilst continuing to devote himself to literary work. I remember having heard Benveniste, in a conversation in 1950, praise him for having shown Kafka’s inability to save himself through language, and Starobinski writes, in his Stendhal (Fribourg: Éditions de la Librairie de l’Université, 1943) that ‘the individual will only save himself by singularising himself and defending his singularity’. 40 The foreword to his Noms d’agent et noms d’action en indoeuropéen (Agent nouns and action nouns in Indo-European, Paris: Maisonneuve, 1948) includes a mention, written with his usual discretion, of this loss and ‘the need to reconstitute the entire documentation’ of the work. 41 ‘Saussure après un demi-siècle’ (Saussure after half a century), Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 20 (1963), 7–21, 8, repr. in PLG 1, pp. 32–45, p. 33.

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42 He taught from mid-June to the end of August: ‘These weeks of teaching are above all for me the best means of seeing the work that is done in America and perhaps initiating specific research projects’ (26 May 1950). 43 [Tr.: Redard here gives the erroneous title which appeared in the  symposium programme, with the semiotic and the semantic ‘corrected’ to semiotics and semantics: see Editors’ Introduction, above, p. 64.] 44 He returned from it very exhausted: ‘For me, too, a rather bad period is coming to an end, and you help me to believe that a year more is a new hope’ (8 June 1969). 45 Benveniste always put it off, hoping to find the time to give a definitive form to some parts which were insufficiently developed in his view; they are simply signalled in his Recherches de dialectologie iranienne (Research in Iranian dialectology, Wiesbaden: L. Reichert), where can be found the details of the itineraries and the investigations. [Tr.: I can find no record of the announced book having appeared.] 46 [Tr.: A fuller version of the following section on Benveniste’s North American fieldwork was published by Redard as ‘Les enquêtes de Benveniste sur les langues indiennes de l’Amérique du Nord’, in É. Benveniste aujourd’hui: Actes du colloque international du CNRS, Université François Rabelais, Tours, 28–30 septembre 1983, vol. 2, ed. J. Taillardat, G. Lazard and G. Serbat (Paris and Louvain: Peeters, 1984), pp. 263–281.] 47 See Les langues du monde, 2nd edn, ed. Antoine Meillet and Marcel Cohen (Paris: CNRS and Honoré Champion, 1952), vol. 2, pp. 1026–33 and map XVII A. 48 These localities have given their name to the two principal dialects of Haida. 49 He brought back five thick notebooks of findings. Two had been ‘recopied at Masset, in the Hotel Kariscourt’, another ‘cleaned up during my return, on the Canadian Pacific Railway train between Vancouver and Winnipeg, the 16th and 17th Sept. 1952’. 50 Whitehorse, terminus of the Skagway railroad, is the capital of Yukon Territory. 51 [Tr.: Benveniste, ‘Le vocabulaire de la vie animale chez les Indiens du Haut Yukon (Alaska)’, Bulletin de la Société de linguistique de Paris 49/1 (1953), 79–106.]



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52 [Tr.: Harry B. Hawthorn (1910–2006), born and educated in New Zealand, founded the anthropology programme at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.] 53 Mélanges linguistiques offerts à Émile Benveniste, ed. Mohammad Djafar Moïnfar (Paris: Société de linguistique de Paris, 1975). 54 As described by the administrator Serge Sauvageot, Bulletin de la Société de linguistique de Paris 71/1 (1976), xx. 55 Langue, discours, société: Pour Émile Benveniste, ed. Julia Kristeva, Jean-Claude Milner and Nicolas Ruwet (Paris: Seuil, 1975). 56 Presiding at the annual public session on 21 November, L. Renou remarked: ‘I am struck with modesty in speaking of the great linguist. Who has ever possessed, to a higher degree than he, the genius of general linguistics, of the most wonderfully innovative comparative grammar, joined to the mastery of one of the most complex of philologies, that of Old Iranian?’ 57 The concordant testimony of many friends permits us to affirm that Benveniste felt honoured at having been chosen in this way, and that this honour was for him more than simply another in his list of successes. 58 Commenting on his election, Le Figaro declared (28 and 29 May 1960): ‘The new academician [. . .], even if his publications are not very numerous, has pursued original research in the dust of Iranian languages, grammar, semantics, philology [sic] . . .’. Benveniste had by then published thirteen books, more than 200 articles and nearly 250 book reviews! 59 This was the last meeting he attended; for the following three (26 April, 28 June, 22 November), he sent his apologies, more evidence of his extreme fatigue. 60 In this period of time, the Société held 498 meetings, of which he attended 363. His absences are almost all explained by external events: stay in Poona (19 meetings), military service (14), fieldwork in the Orient (10) and in Alaska (4), rest imposed after his heart attack of 9 December 1956 (12). 61 Joseph Vendryes was elected Secretary in 1936 in succession to Michel Bréal (1866–1915) and Meillet (1915–36), but when the Société resumed its activity in 1945, he had reached retirement age and ‘accepted only the title, with the Adjunct Secretary effectively carrying out the work. This arrangement, renewed annually,

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lasted until 1958’ [Tr.: from Benveniste’s obituary of Vendryes, Bulletin de la Société de linguistique de Paris 55 (1960), 1–9]. A heavy load which sometimes overburdened him: ‘I hope that we’ll soon be able to distribute a thick Bulletin, 1954, very late, the correcting of which takes up my nights’ (4 Mar. 1955). 62 He was then named Honorary Secretary, with the editing of the Bulletin passing to Michel Lejeune, assisted by the Adjunct Secretary Jean Perrot. 63 Sometimes he nodded in approval, almost imperceptibly, sometimes he showed his disagreement with a pout or his annoyance with an involuntary clicking of his ballpoint pen. 64 With Pierre Gourou and Claude Lévi-Strauss, he was editor of L’Homme, the French anthropology journal which first appeared in 1961; and from 1964, with Haig Berbérian, the new series of the Revue des études arméniennes (Review of Armenian studies), contributing the preface to the first volume. 65 Joseph Vendryes, at the start of his obituary of Meillet in Bulletin de la Société de linguistique de Paris 38/1 (1937), 1. 66 It suffices to see with what stunning confidence he signals the disagreements over details in reviewing Jules Bloch’s L’indoaryen (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1934) or Manfred Mayrhofer’s Kurzgefasstes etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindischen (Concise etymological Sanskrit dictionary, 2 vols, Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1953–4).

Annex 2:

The Émile Benveniste Papers Émilie Brunet

Papers of Orientalists: Émile Benveniste (Aleppo [27 May] 1902 – [Versailles] 3 October 1976), eminent Iranologist who taught, from 1927, in the 4th Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études and from 1937 in the Collège de France and whose erudition covered notably the whole domain of Ancient Iranian and more particularly Old and Middle Persian and Avestan.   These papers – of capital importance – bequeathed to the Bibliothèque Nationale and deposited in the Département des Manuscrits on 30 December 1976, will be more amply analysed in a forthcoming article.1

With these lines, published a few months after Benveniste’s death, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF) announced the arrival in its collections of the linguist’s scientific archives, manuscripts of which the present volume undeniably confirms the ‘capital importance’. The promised article, which was to present the papers more precisely, never materialised, with the result that, to borrow Irène Fenoglio’s metaphor, the archive remained asleep, and even Jean Lallot’s 1981 gift of a partial manuscript of Benveniste’s Vocabulaire des institutions indoeuropéennes annotated by the author did not awaken it.2 Only at the start of the 2000s did more than a handful of researchers begin to consult it at the rue de Richelieu, in Paris, in the charming Oriental reading room of the BnF’s manuscript department. This interest inspired the BnF to inventory and catalogue the archive so as to facilitate access to it by researchers. Though the technical work is far from complete, we can present the history of this archive, traced thanks to what has turned out to be a 157

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veritable inquest. We shall see that it has allowed us to detect the existence of papers outside the BnF, despite this being where Benveniste chose to bequeath them.

The Wills of Émile Benveniste and His Sister Carmelia Benveniste Émile Benveniste died on 3 October 1976 in Versailles. His will dated 19733 contains his intention to bequeath his manuscripts to the ‘Bibliothèque nationale de Paris’4 which was thus assigned the task of cataloguing them. In this document the linguist moreover named his sister Carmelia Benveniste (1904–1979) as his executor, with Georges Redard (1922–2005)5 as alternate in case Carmelia should die before her brother. Benveniste specified that his executor should take charge of selling his library intact to a single buyer. He gave his preference to a scientific institution, university or research centre without designating a specific one. He specified however that the institution chosen should place on or in each of the scientific volumes purchased, the mention ‘Ex libris Émile Benveniste’ or ‘This book belonged to Émile Benveniste’. Another of the scholar’s wishes: the sum obtained should serve for the advancement of Iranian studies (buying books, awarding a scholarship to a young researcher, creating an ‘Émile Benveniste Fund’, or something of the sort). A draft sales contract between Carmelia Benveniste and the State Council of the Canton of Berne dated 1975 and kept in the archives of the Collège de France put us on the trail of the sale of Benveniste’s library to the Linguistics Institute of the University of Berne where Georges Redard taught. Professor Iwar Werlen, current Director of the Institute, confirmed to us that this had indeed taken place and that most of the books, brochures and offprints had then been integrated into the Institute’s library. As for author’s rights, Carmela Benveniste, with Georges Redard as intermediary, bequeathed them in 1982 to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, which has held them since 1984 (we note that if the Académie had refused, they would have gone to the Institute of Iranian Studies of the Université de Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle). Jean Leclant, perma-



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nent secretary of the Académie, who died in 2011, informed us of the existence of an Émile Benveniste Foundation which has the purpose of awarding funds to researchers writing work relating to the research domains in which Benveniste gained his fame (comparative Indo-European grammar, Iranian linguistics, general linguistics . . .).

Papers in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France . . . In accordance with the scholar’s wishes, the majority of Benveniste’s papers are kept in the BnF. Transmitted by Georges Redard in December 1976, this archive represents seven bound volumes and twenty-eight boxes of material held within the collection ‘Papiers des Orientalistes’ (Papers of Orientalists) of the Département des Manuscrits (call number PAP OR 29 to 63). This legacy was completed in 1981 by Jean Lallot’s gift, mentioned above, of an annotated partial manuscript of the Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes (PAP OR 73). In 2004 Georges Redard made another donation of papers belonging to Benveniste which he discovered were still in his possession. Thus 409 sheets on ‘poetic language’ joined the collections of the Département des Manuscrits, with the help of Isabelle Szelagowski, assistant to Gérard Fussman,6 and were the subject of the doctoral thesis of Chloé Laplantine. Stamped, classified and inventoried, these papers, most of which are about Baudelaire, are not yet catalogued and can be requested by their Gift Number, d.04-29. The last complement to the initial legacy took place in April 2006 when Georges Redard’s widow transmitted a set of scientific papers by Benveniste, again with the help of Gérard Fussman, whom she had entrusted with the task of sorting her late husband’s papers. Like the previous gift, this one has not yet been catalogued but was inventoried (d.06-15) and described, soon after its arrival, by Irène Fenoglio and Chloé Laplantine. Monique Cohen, then Director of the Département des Manuscrits of the BnF, effectively authorised them to consult the papers – including unpublished studies of Greek vocabulary – in her office, along with two microfilm negative rolls and a series of photographs from Benveniste’s travels.7

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In his letter to Monique Cohen accompanying the gift, Gérard Fussman indicated that he had done a triage of Georges Redard’s papers and had transmitted some of Benveniste’s personal archives (including identity documents) to the Collège de France, in parallel with the gift made to the BnF. In her reply, the Director of the Department asked him, in the interest of researchers working on Benveniste, for a list of the documents sent to the Collège. None was forthcoming. We were therefore led to the Archive Service of the Collège de France in the footsteps of Irène Fenoglio, who had begun her research by consulting these papers.

Other Papers in the Collège de France . . . Because Benveniste taught there from 1934 – initially filling in for Antoine Meillet (1866–1936) – until his stroke in 1969, the Archive Service of the Collège de France holds a personal dossier comprising sixty-one different items: administrative documents, a bibliography, correspondence, reports, course programmes, medical leave dossier, retirement dossier, press cuttings . . . Madame Redard’s gift via Gérard Fussman, which completed these papers in 2005, comprises six boxes of archives. Transmitted in several batches, the documents are again very diverse, and Benveniste’s papers have sometimes been annotated by Georges Redard and are mixed in with his own.8 It is thus that was found a copy of the unfinished biography of Benveniste which Redard had undertaken – annotated by Françoise Bader,9 who would also work on editing a biography of the linguist and who consulted these papers before Fussman transmitted them to the archives. Besides personal archives there figure amongst these documents a long list of offprints (of articles and book reviews) as well as of scientific papers of the greatest importance, notably notebooks of fieldwork conducted by Benveniste during his trips to Iran and Afghanistan in 1947. It should be specified that the archivists of the Collège de France allow access to and consultation of this set of papers only on the authorisation of the Director of Archives of France; they bear the call number CDF 28.



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. . . but not in the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine The catalogue of IMEC indicates that course notes of Benveniste are held in its archives at the Abbaye d’Ardenne de SaintGermain-la-Blanche-Herbe near Caen. In fact they are Georges Redard’s notes from three of Benveniste’s courses: ‘Problèmes de syntaxe générale’ (Problems of general syntax, 1949–50), ‘Syntaxe des cas’ and ‘La flexion dans les langues indoeuropéennes’ (Syntax of cases, Inflection in the Indo-European languages, 1954–5), and ‘Les pronoms’ (Pronouns, 1955–6).

Notebooks in the University of Alaska Fairbanks (USA) The Elmer E. Rasmuson Library of the University of Alaska Fairbanks holds twenty-seven research notebooks of Benveniste’s and manuscript notes concerning the Amerindian languages of North America (Haida, Tlingit, Inuktitut . . .).10 Amongst the papers in the 2006 gift held in the BnF is an entire documentation (correspondence, donation certificates, inventories) attesting that Georges Redard made the gift of these documents in several batches: September 1991 (inventory number 91-180), April 1992 (no. 92-058) and November 1992 (no. 92-223). The personal inventory of Chloé Laplantine, who travelled to Alaska in 2005, takes account of 1,506 sheets. By going against what was specified in Benveniste’s will and sending the notebooks where they would have the greatest chance of encountering the expertise of specialist researchers, Georges Redard was hoping to promote the development of the study of the languages concerned and to contribute to spreading Benveniste’s work, even if it contributed to the scattering of his papers.

Notes  1 Bulletin de la Bibliothèque Nationale 1, 2e année (mars 1977), 12–13.  2 See Revue de la Bibliothèque Nationale 3, 2e année (mars

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1982), 49. Jean Lallot prepared the summaries, table and index of Benveniste’s Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes (1969).   3 A copy of this will is on file in dossier no. E160/47 of the Émile Benveniste Bequest (1973–8) held in the BnF and consultable upon authorisation. The document was drawn up on 6 August 1973 in the presence of Ms Ader, notary, and two witnesses, professors and members of the Institut, Messrs Pierre Chantraine and Louis Robert. In it Benveniste declares himself to be ‘physically ill and mentally sound’. The will specifies that, in case of refusal by the BnF, Benveniste had foreseen entrusting his papers to the Collège de France.   4 We should specify that this designation has never been officially used to designate the French National Library. Previously the Bibliothèque Royale, Impériale or Nationale, the current name is the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, or BnF.  5 A professor in the University of Berne (Switzerland) and Benveniste’s close friend, Redard was a specialist in Iranian dialects and taught general linguistics and Indo-European philology.   6 Professor of the Indian World in the Collège de France, student and friend of Georges Redard.   7 In 2007, we announced the arrival of these papers in the collections of the BnF in the Revue de la Bibliothèque Nationale de France 27, 92.   8 Which leads us to suspect – although we have not yet had the opportunity to verify it – that papers of Benveniste’s may still be found amongst those of Georges Redard, whose archive is now held in the Swiss Literary Archives in Berne.   9 A specialist in the comparative grammar of the Indo-European languages, Françoise Bader is Director Emerita of Studies in the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Historical and Philological Sciences Section). 10 This aspect of Benveniste’s work is described in Redard’s biographical study in the present volume.

Afterword:

Émile Benveniste, a Scholar’s Fate Tzvetan Todorov

Arriving in Paris from my native Bulgaria in the spring of 1963, I set about finding a course dealing with the general properties of language, in what was for me the barely comprehensible tangle of university programmes. I was not a linguist; my principal interest was the study of literature, but I was persuaded that to make advances in this study required a better understanding of the verbal material of which literary works were made. After a few false starts, I discovered that a certain Émile Benveniste was giving a course in general linguistics in the Collège de France, and I turned up there in the autumn of that same year. There was no difficulty in attending, as no enrolment was necessary. We were not very numerous in the little room of the Collège. A side door next to the dais opened and a rather slender man, wearing thick glasses, a bundle of papers in hand, placed himself before us. At no moment did he look at us; at the end of an hour, he gathered his papers, then left by the same door, just as discreetly. His voice was frail, like his body, but perfectly audible. His delivery was rather slow, and it was possible to write down everything he said without even abbreviating words. And one wanted to do it: even when throwing new light on his subject, his treatment of it had a great limpidity. Like the others present, I was enchanted by this experience and, over several years, I returned regularly to the sombre rooms of the Collège. I have forgotten the precise theme of these courses, and I have not bothered to look them up, but I know that it had no relation to my literary interests. Nevertheless, the draw which this discourse had on me did not weaken. I had the impression of witnessing the exemplary unfolding of scientific 163

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method, both prudent and firm, and of being at the same time in the presence of an archetypal scholar, discreet, modest, timid even, but whose mind darted about audaciously. No thundering orations, no swagger, no smokescreens: a precise knowledge of the facts, a concern for clarity, a capacity for seeing beyond appearances and revealing the general through the particular. In 1966, the appearance of the collection Problèmes de linguistique générale made Benveniste’s name familiar to a considerably wider audience, attendance in the course grew, and it was probably moved to a larger room. It was in this period too that I got to know him personally, perhaps through the intermediary of Roman Jakobson, whom I had met several times previously; but I never became his close friend. My admiration for his work continued and, that same year, I published in the journal Critique a glowing review of his book, entitled ‘La linguistique, science de l’homme’ (Linguistics, science of man). What particularly attracted me in his work was his attention to questions of meaning and to what he called énonciation, enunciation, aspects of language which I was certain were pertinent for literary studies. It was in this context that I asked him to collaborate on a special issue of the journal Langages, devoted to ‘enunciation’. His text, ‘L’appareil formel de l’énonciation’ (The formal apparatus of enunciation), must be one of the last he wrote. Then, in December 1969, came the bad news: he had suffered a stroke, was hospitalised, had lost his speech. I visited him several times in hospital, and the experience was all the more painful because one quickly realised that his intelligence was not destroyed. He well understood what was said to him and reacted – but without words. His infirmity was what is called expression aphasia. I remember – this must have happened in 1971–2 – that I was telling him about work I was doing which involved the phenomenon of euphemism; he perked up and showed me his collection of articles which was close at hand. When I placed the book in his hands, he opened it to the page on which began his text ‘Euphémismes anciens et modernes’ (Ancient and modern euphemisms) . . . He sometimes tried to write, in large capital letters, but it was difficult for him.

Afterword 165 With his condition not improving, he was required to leave the hospital. His nearest relative, his sister Carmelia Benveniste, began searching for a private rest home. Since she did not drive, I put myself at her disposal with my little car, and during a season we criss-crossed the Paris region, visiting various establishments which might take him in. These visits were rather depressing, the places were sad, the appearance of their residents hardly encouraging, the politeness of the managers seemed to be purely perfunctory. I then lost contact with the family. In 1975, I participated in the two volumes of homages dedicated to him. Then, one day in 1976, I learned of his death. I thus had a direct knowledge of two small fragments of Benveniste’s existence: I saw him from a distance, professing his course in the Collège de France; and up close, in the hospital, when he could no longer speak. Apart from his writings on general linguistics, I was not familiar with his work, still less with his life. Hence I have learned much from reading the biographical note which his colleague and friend Georges Redard began to write (included above), as well as from the Biographical Timeline established by those responsible for the present volume. Benveniste’s active life divides into two periods of unequal length, clearly distinct, even opposed. During the first (1902–27), his existence can be qualified as marginal, uncertain, peripatetic. Born in Aleppo, Syria, of Jewish parents, inspectors of Israelite schools, he follows them during several years of their moves. At the age of eleven, he is sent – alone? – to Paris to be enrolled in a rabbinical school. His parents are working at this time in Bulgaria – which however, unlike Syria, is no longer part of the Ottoman Empire. They live in Samokov, a small provincial town. His mother will die there in 1919, apparently without having seen her son again. He obtains his baccalaureate at sixteen (with the minimal mark, ‘passable’) but seems already to have contracted the linguistic virus, thanks to an inspiring teacher: he draws up the list of a dozen languages which he projects learning, enrols in courses at the Sorbonne, where he attends the lectures of Joseph Vendryes, and also frequents the Collège de France, where Antoine Meillet professes, the grand master of the comparative

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grammar of the Indo-European languages. What attracts the adolescent to this arid subject is the fact that, as he will say much later,1 its procedures ‘were rigorous in nature and always pushing toward a still greater rigour’. But these are not his only interests; we also see him drawn to questions of literature and politics, and a few years later he co-signs articles in L’Humanité, with Henri Barbusse or with members of the Surrealist group. One of them is entitled ‘Revolution First and Forever’ . . . He also signs a manifesto against the colonial war which France is waging in Morocco. All through these years, this little immigrant’s means of subsistence seem meagre. At the Rabbinical School he holds a scholarship. During his university years, he likely worked as a tutor in a lycée. After obtaining his agrégation (at the age of twenty), he teaches for two years in a college; then, in 1924–6, leaves for India as tutor to the children of a wealthy family. In 1926–7 (he meanwhile acquired French nationality, and changed his name from Ezra to Émile) he must do his military service: he is sent to Morocco, where the war he had condemned shortly before is raging. The big change happens in 1927, when he is elected Director of Studies and appointed to the chair of comparative grammar in the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and from this moment on his career follows a straight line. He defends his thesis in 1936, becomes professor in the Collège de France in 1937. Since as early as 1920, he is one of the most assiduous members of the Société de linguistique de Paris; he becomes editor of its Bulletin and publishes dozens of articles and book reviews in its pages. He will also be a member of various other learned societies and associations, and elected to the Institut de France in 1960. Between 1931 and 1967, he participates in all the international congresses of linguistics, but also in numerous other scholarly meetings. He achieved his project of learning many languages, including the Celtic languages, (Archaic) Latin, Sogdian, (Ancient) Iranian, Hittite, Tokharian, Sanskrit, Armenian, Ancient Greek, the old Germanic languages, the Baltic languages . . . During a stay in Iran and Afghanistan, he plunges into the study of five Pamir languages. On another research trip, to North America, he develops a passion for two

Afterword 167 languages of the Na-Dene family, Haida and Tlingit. In addition he masters several modern European languages, including English, German, Italian and Spanish. The only perturbation in this brilliant career occurs during World War II. Benveniste is mobilised from the start. Made a prisoner of war in 1940, he escapes from his camp in the Ardennes a year and a half later, takes refuge in the unoccupied zone, and from there succeeds in fleeing to Switzerland, where he works in the library of Fribourg. He returns to Paris the day after the Liberation, to find his flat devastated and learning that his elder brother had been arrested and deported to Auschwitz, never to return.2 No mention is ever found of these tragic events in Benveniste’s published writings, nor any trace whatever in the themes of his work after the war.3 The last period, 1969–76, is that of his confinement due to illness. To what I already knew may be added some unflattering information concerning the French hospital system. It seems that, if the trouble had been taken, a certain amount of rehabilitation should have been possible, especially during the first year after the stroke; it was not really attempted. On the other hand, the impressions left on Benveniste’s visitors by the successive rest homes where he stayed (nine in all) are deplorable and unworthy of a country as rich as France: dilapidated, noisy, neglected – and yet quite expensive. The global impression that emerges from this overview of Benveniste’s trajectory is of an existence devoted, for more than forty years (1927–40, 1944–69) to one exclusive passion, the knowledge of language. He entered science as one enters a religious order, body and soul: it is more than a vocation, a priesthood. Everything happens as if, to the interest that he has for languages and for language, was added a feeling of duty, of recognition toward this profession which snatched him from material uncertainties and accorded him a remarkable dignity and prestige, him, the poor little Jewish boy who emigrated to France, coming from his Oriental land without his parents. The work, for him, is thus both a passion and a duty. He has no friends outside the circle of his colleagues, never takes vacations. When he leaves his work table, it is to go to participate in a scholarly meeting or take himself ‘into the field’ to describe

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languages that have never been studied. After his heart attack in 1956, his only complaint to those close to him is about his diminished work capacity. ‘The hardest thing is being forbidden to work. I am paying dearly for a long period of overworking.’ ‘I can only work for two or three hours a day.’ ‘I am working a little, but really little.’ ‘My ability to work is slowly returning.’ We are fortunate to have at our disposal some narratives a bit personal in nature from a research trip he made to the northwest coast of the American continent. Work always occupies a large place. In 1952, he stays in the islands of British Columbia. ‘I work every day with some old folk [. . .]. The material life of an isolated white man [. . .] poses numerous problems at every moment, and it’s a big inconvenience for my work’: here again, it is the only suffering he complains about. A year later, he goes to Yukon Territory, in Canada. ‘During this whole summer I have hardly let a day pass without working with one or another of my informants. It was necessary to make the most of the chance I had . . .’. He goes one day to the city of Whitehorse, the ‘metropolis of the Yukon’, and discovers to his despair that his informants miss their appointment and that the bus only comes through twice a week. ‘I am enraged by the idea that I may have to spend two days idle here.’ Hell compared with the heaven that he experienced a few weeks earlier, ‘working from morning to night gathering forms and sentences, intoxicated with this tiring and novel work’. He ends up however discovering, during a few rare moments, an alternative to work: a feeling of communion with nature. On the banks of the Yukon, ‘the intense poetry of the river with its chalky banks, flowing through the sloping foliage with a vivid and powerful motion, slowly penetrated me and erased the sullen mood which had invaded me’. The scholar intoxicated by his work makes one think of creative artists. At the start of the twentieth century, Rilke (an author cherished by Benveniste in his youth) thought he had discovered in it the secret of an artist’s life. It was the lesson he had learned from Rodin starting with their first meetings; Rilke wrote to him later: ‘I came to you to ask you: how must one live? And you answered me: by working.’ He later realises that this is also Cézanne’s opinion: ‘I think there is nothing better than work.’ Evidently, such a choice entails sacrifices: the creator

Afterword 169 cannot devote much time to his relationships with other human beings, but is condemned to solitude. But is this to be regretted? Beethoven, another artist whom Rilke cites, wrote in a letter, ‘I have no friends, I must live alone with myself; but I know that God is closer to me in my art than He is to other men.’ The scholar too must try to impose this asceticism on himself, in order to be able to go further in his research. The price to be paid is, again, a great human solitude. Kierkegaard’s formula, copied by Benveniste in his papers and included as an epigraph to the Editors’ Introduction in the present volume, did not strike his mind haphazardly: it concerns the ‘bachelors, solitary men, who live only for an idea’. Benveniste writes of Saussure, whose fate greatly preoccupied him: ‘There is in every creator a certain exigency, hidden, permanent, which sustains and devours him, which [. . .] calls no truce when he tries to escape from it.’4 These words seem to describe himself, and the experience which they evoke resembles a gift as much as a curse. One of his closest friends describes ‘the same Benveniste as always’ as a man ‘shut up within himself, keeping his feelings secret and preferring not to bother others’ (p. 131 above). He himself evokes his ‘solitary meditations’. Nor do we find in his mature published writings any trace of his literary interests, his artistic tastes, his political opinions. He is interested in all languages and in all of language – but in nothing else. The specialist in human communication is singularly disinclined to it. Benveniste’s scientific studies divide, in my view, into three great sectors. The first is that of his original discipline, comparative grammar and the study of the Indo-European languages. It is effectively a postulate for him that ‘reflection on language is only fruitful if it first deals with real languages’.5 He thus devotes numerous studies to several of these languages, in particular Hittite, Sanskrit, Iranian, Ancient Greek, Latin, French, as well as comparing them. There probably exists no individual in the world possessing so vast an encyclopaedic knowledge in this domain. But he also insists greatly on the necessity of studying all languages, whatever the extension of the territory in which they are spoken or the role they have played in history: from the linguistic point of view, the Indo-European languages enjoy no privilege. No language is more ‘primitive’ than another, and

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each reveals a new facet of the human mind. Their knowledge has no need of a practical justification, the study of the human being finds its end in itself, indeed it is part of the very vocation of our species. The second domain is that of the history of ideas and mentalities, studied through languages and, more specifically, vocabulary. Benveniste’s research bearing on this has been published, notably in the two volumes of his Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes (Vocabulary of Indo-European institutions) of 1969, and in the sections entitled ‘Lexique et culture’ (Lexicon and culture) in PLG 1 and ‘L’homme dans le langage’ (Man in language) in PLG 2. A language allows us to seize the culture of a population at a given moment, since thinking runs in words; but the grasp of the world which takes place through each language does not resemble that of another. ‘Language reproduces the world, but by submitting it to its own organisation.’6 Confronting languages with one another is therefore instructive, not only for knowing the past, but also for better understanding the categories of thinking which we continue to use each day, as is shown by the examples he analyses of ‘civilisation’, ‘culture’, ‘rhythm’, ‘gift’, ‘exchange’, ‘science’ or ‘city’. These studies of Benveniste’s, which testify to a happy marriage between knowledge and intelligence, have lost none of their currency. Readers of the present volume will find a suggestive example of this in the pages devoted to the concepts of ‘reading’ and ‘writing’. Finally the third great domain which Benveniste takes on (and the only one in which I know the entirety of his contributions) is general linguistics, that is, the theory of language, such as it can be constructed through the study of each particular language. Which does not mean: by ignoring this latter study. ‘The linguist needs to know as many languages as possible in order to define language.’7 If not, he risks naïvely holding up the categories of his own language as a universal model. To escape this trap, Benveniste, although he knows numerous languages other than French, decides at the start of the 1950s to expose himself directly to languages totally foreign to the Indo-European family, and undertakes his two prolonged stays in the north-west of the American continent, where he studies

Afterword 171 two Amerindian languages. This is a rather remarkable gesture: no external constraint pushes the professor of the Collège de France to break his quiet life and abandon his comfort in order to spend long months amidst the destitute populations of British Columbia and the Yukon. But since his purpose in life is to promote knowledge, and since moreover he is convinced that this requires comparison amongst specimens as different from one another as possible, he does not hesitate to launch himself into the adventure. The sort of comparison he was accustomed to until then was between closely related languages, issued from the same source, where resemblance could be taken for granted – and ­demonstrated. The radical comparison, or confrontation, which he now undertakes is something else entirely: what is enlightening is the difference between the language being studied and one’s own language. He proceeds like an ethnologist whose ambition is to describe a foreign society, the contrast between the distant and the familiar permitting him to see others better and, at the same time, to discover himself. But he would then be an ethnologist of the universalist type: starting from differences allows him to put his conception of what language is in general on a firmer foundation. The ‘problems’ treated in the studies which make up the two Benveniste collections are numerous and varied. A constant can nevertheless be observed: language for him is not one human characteristic amongst others, it provides the basis for all the categories and institutions characteristic of our species. There exists no thinking independent of language: ‘We think a universe that our language first modelled.’8 ‘The possibility of thinking is bound to the faculty of language, for [. . .] to think is to wield the signs of a language.’9 Without language, or more generally without what Benveniste calls ‘the symbolising faculty’ or ‘the essentially symbolic capacity for representation’, abstraction is impossible, just as is creative imagination.10 Therein lies, for him, the irreducible difference between people and animals. This is why he can also say: ‘Man was not created twice, once without language, and once with language’:11 man is definitively distinguished from apes starting from the moment he begins to speak. ‘We never reach man separated from language and we

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never see him inventing it. [. . .] Language teaches us the very definition of man.’12 The same with society: human communities cannot be conceived without verbal exchange amongst their members. Every society has a culture, that is to say a set of shared representations and rules, which are manifested through language. Benveniste goes further: in a certain sense, the language includes the society, for it permits its description and interpretation (it is the interpretant of all the symbolic systems proper to the human species). ‘A society becomes signifying in and through a language, the society is the interpreted par excellence of the language.’13 At the same time, without language, there is no human subject. ‘It is in and through language that man is constituted as subject [. . .]. This “subjectivity” [. . .] is only the emergence in a being of a fundamental property of language. “Ego” is the one who says “ego”.’14 The category of person in turn depends on this. Benveniste proposes to study ‘subjectivity in language’, the presence of man in his verbal utterances, but he affirms at the same time, and no less strongly, the ‘linguistic in the subject’, the presence of language in all human acts and attitudes. These theses, which Benveniste defends eloquently, did not originate with him, but are shared with other contemporary thinkers. There exists on the other hand another theme of general linguistics where he is the pioneer: the study of that aspect of language which allows individuals to take hold of the abstract linguistic code and put it to work in their exchanges. In beginning to formulate this problematic, Benveniste found himself obliged to submit to critical examination the thinking of his intellectual icon, Ferdinand de Saussure, whose work was however so dear to him. It is true that, as early as 1939, he had rejected the Saussurean idea of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign; but he continued no less to claim the master’s heritage. This time, he questions one of Saussure’s fundamental distinctions, the one between langue and parole. For the Genevese linguist, parole, speech, is only an actualisation of langue, the language system; it is the empirical given from which we must extract and construct an object of knowledge, which he calls precisely the langue. Parole, such as it can be heard in daily exchange, has no interest in itself. The thousand and one ways of pronouncing

Afterword 173 the word ‘house’ do not affect its identity and so do not have to retain the linguist’s attention for long: it is always to do with the same word ‘house’, an abstraction certainly, but which alone deserves to be studied. So too with other parallel designations of the same relation, such as those practised in the 1920s and 1930s by the Prague Linguistic Circle, or the ‘code’ and ‘message’ adopted by his friend Jakobson in the 1950s. With the passage of time, Benveniste reaches the conclusion that such a conceptualisation falsifies linguistic reality and that on this point it is necessary to abandon the structuralist conception, that of Saussure and Jakobson. He joins in this criticism the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin, whose work he cannot have known since it was suppressed from the end of the 1920s, and which presents itself in its turn as a critique of Saussure and the Russian formalists, guilty of conceiving of a language as a code. Parole (a term Benveniste seldom used) is not simply the actualisation of a langue; its study demands a change of perspective and the creation of a new subdivision of linguistics – for the new perspective creates a new object of knowledge. This discovery comes about in two stages. During the first, which occurs in the 1950s, Benveniste begins to list all the linguistic forms which refer to elements of the context in which certain sentences are pronounced or written. In effect, alongside the terms whose meaning does not depend on the frame in which they are enunciated, there are others which refer directly to it. Thus, to begin with, the personal pronouns, ‘I’ and ‘you’, which designate not abstractions but the one who is speaking and the one being addressed. Thus deixis, demonstrative pronouns like ‘this’ or ‘that’, adverbs like ‘here’ and ‘now’, which depend on the moment and the place of the enunciation. Thus verb tenses, always organised starting from the axis of the present, a tense which is defined precisely as that in which the discourse is produced. Thus again verbs which designate, not the world, but the speaker’s attitude toward his own utterance, such as ‘I think that . . .’ or ‘I suppose that . . .’. Thus finally the verbs called ‘performative’, such as ‘I swear’ or ‘I promise’, which, by their enunciation, realise the action which they signify. All this constitutes what Benveniste calls ‘subjectivity in language’ or ‘the formal apparatus of enunciation’: the traces left within the

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utterance by the discourse instance, which attests to the anchoring of the linguistic code in the verbal exchange, hence of the way in which the language is converted into discourse. The second stage is that of Benveniste’s last research projects, starting in 1964. This time, the most radical change. It is no longer enough to say that concrete human beings have the means of introducing themselves into language; now Benveniste affirms that it is a matter of two autonomous objects, and therefore of two distinct disciplines. The linguistics conceived by Saussure and the structuralists is a linguistics of the language; the one for which he is formulating the principles and the project would be a linguistics of discourse. For Benveniste, two very distinct realities are conflated under the same word ‘language’. On the one hand, the language as repertoire or inventory of words and possible grammatical forms, what can be found in a dictionary and a grammar book, with its enumerations of conjugations and declensions: what one memorises when learning a foreign language. And, on the other hand, the language as production, as an ever-new linking of words within sentences, and of sentences within discourses, each time a unique event, the purpose of which is to articulate a thought or an intention. It no longer provokes recognition of a form (‘I know this word’), but comprehension of a meaning (‘I understand what you want to say’). The typical operations of each of these two objects are, on the one hand, substitution, on the other, connection. Here we find again the Saussurean opposition between paradigm and syntagm, and Jakobson’s between ‘two axes of language’, but rendered much more radical, since now the autonomy of the two objects and the two disciplines has been affirmed. The clear distinction of the two perspectives allows us to clarify certain frequently debated questions. Is perfect translation possible? Not always between languages considered as repertoire, since each cuts up the world in its own way; on the other hand, it is always possible to express the same thought in a different language. Is painting a kind of language? Yes, in the sense of discourse, since a painting can transmit a thought or a sentiment; but not in the sense of a language system, since it does not have at its disposal a repertoire of signs recognisable by all. One might add, conversely (the example is not Benveniste’s),

Afterword 175 that the teaching of foreign languages in France suffers from their being learned as repertoires (memorising vocabulary and rules of grammar), not as a production of meaning, hence as a means of exchange amongst living subjects. The conversion of the language into discourse is accomplished first by combining words into sentences, during which the potential meaning of each term is concretised and transformed. This process is prolonged by the linking of several sentences within a same text (or discourse), where each new sentence can contribute to specifying or modifying the meaning of the one preceding it. Moreover, the same sentence can take on different meanings depending on the context of its enunciation: who says it, to whom, where, when, how (‘If God is dead everything is permitted’ does not have the same sense in Dostoevsky and Nietzsche). This ‘conversion’ is thus a progressive movement, with several degrees and several steps. The interpretation of discourses and texts no longer comes under the competence of the linguist alone, since it simultaneously calls upon the historian’s knowledge and the exegete’s perspicacity. Benveniste’s work in the domain of general linguistics, such as we are able to know it today, produces a double impression. On the one hand, a series of remarkable intuitions, new insights, promising ideas; on the other, a feeling of incompleteness, fragmentation, a regrettable absence of synthesis, despite several attempts in this direction during the last years, such as his studies ‘La forme et le sens dans le langage’ (Form and meaning in language, 1966) or ‘Structure de la langue et structure de la société’ (Structure of the language and structure of the society, 1968). One begins to think that the same thing applies to Benveniste as Meillet said when Saussure died, which Benveniste quotes: ‘His disciples have the feeling that he did not quite occupy the position in the linguistics of his time that his genius should have merited’; whence the feeling that he ‘had not fulfilled his entire destiny’.15 And yet, several years later, Saussure’s disciples published his Cours de linguistique générale, based on his notes and those of his students, a book which would influence the evolution of the discipline for decades. But nothing of the sort can happen with Benveniste. He himself relates the circumstances of the

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Cours: Saussure, who taught comparative grammar, had many ideas about general linguistics, but struggled to formulate them. Then, in 1907, ‘he was under the constraint to give a general introductory course to the students of a colleague who had retired’.16 It was thus through an obligation, and reluctantly, that Saussure systematised his ideas and gave them a form comprehensible to non-specialists, his beginner students. Such is the secret of his course’s enduring success. But no one obliged Benveniste to give such a course: he was a professor in the Collège de France, and happy to be, because there he enjoyed, he said in an interview, ‘a complete freedom’ with no academic responsibilities toward those attending his lectures. It was even, in a sense, forbidden to him to create a course, since his lectures must never be repeated.17 Nor in his writing does Benveniste feel the need to transform his point-by-point observations into a coherent overview: when he collects his texts for the first volume of the PLG, he specifies in the introduction: ‘We have purposely abstained from any retrospective intervention in the presentation as in the conclusions . . .’.18 How can we help but regret this decision which nothing imposed on him? He himself was dissatisfied with what he accomplished. He wrote to his friend Georges Redard in the 1950s that he ‘would like to have another lifetime to fill’; a few years later, he is surprised to find himself meditating ‘on how little I’ve achieved of all that I’d hoped to do’. Can we today, so many years after his death, discern the causes of the impossibility he expresses? We can note that, like nearly all the scholars of his time, Benveniste lived with a rather austere ideal of science, preventing him from crossing what he judged to be its borders, in order to let him introduce external elements, historical or political, literary or philosophical. It is a bit paradoxical to see how the theoretician of ‘subjectivity in language’ confines himself, in his writings, to a strictly objective approach: he speaks always and only of language, never of himself, nor of what has led him to think in the way he does. At the same time, how can we ignore how tirelessly Benveniste submits himself to all the exigencies which appear to him inherent to the scientific profession? The young immigrant becomes an exemplary incarnation of the professional scholar. And yet,

Afterword 177 another letter shows how this does not always leave him completely satisfied: ‘Writing for particular events absorbs all my time’, he complains, referring not only to his numerous reviews and reports, but also to the weekly or monthly meetings, the colloquia and congresses, the associations and learned societies, the work of coordination and organisation. Benveniste acquits himself scrupulously of what he considers his obligations, or perhaps as a price to be paid for the recognition he received; but then he is never available for a long-term project which would crown his research of several decades, and must be content with these dispersed studies, their flashes of insight dazzling, but fragmentary and repetitive. Nor is he helped in this regard by the fact that his teaching in the Collège carries so few constraints. Everything takes place as if the ritual of science, as practised in his time, contributed to damaging the scholar’s work. Today it remains for us to read the texts of Émile Benveniste, the greatest French linguist of the twentieth century, and dream of the paths we did not know existed until he showed us.

Notes   1 ‘Structuralisme et linguistique’, an interview with Pierre Daix, Les lettres françaises 1242 (24–30 juillet 1968), 10–13, repr. in PLG 2, pp. 11–28, p. 12.  2 [Tr.: Todorov here repeats the confusing account of Henri Benveniste having been arrested in the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup (see note in Biographical Timeline, p. xii).]  3 [Tr.: The Fourteenth Lecture contains a passing reference to ‘Buchenwald’ which it is unlikely that Benveniste would have made or his audience recognised were it not for the concentration camp located there, in which perished, amongst tens of thousands of others, France’s premier Sinologist, Henri Maspero (1883– 1945), Benveniste’s colleague in the École Pratique des Hautes Études. The next occupant of Maspero’s chair in the Collège de France was Paul Demiéville, Benveniste’s friend from their days as Meillet’s students.]  4 ‘Saussure après un demi-siècle’ (Saussure after half a century), Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 20 (1963), 7–21, 8, repr. in PLG 1, pp. 32–45, p. 33.

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  5 Preface to PLG 1, pp. 1–2, p. 1.   6 ‘Coup d’œil sur le développement de la linguistique’ (The development of linguistics at a glance), Compte rendu des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 106/2 (Année 1962, Paris: Klincksieck, 1963), pp. 369–80, p. 375, repr. in PLG 1, pp. 18–31, p. 25.  7 ‘Ce langage qui fait l’histoire’ (This language which makes history), interview with Guy Dumur, Le Nouvel Observateur, spécial littéraire, no. 210 bis (20 nov.–20 déc. 1968), 28–34, repr. in PLG 2, pp. 29–40, p. 30.   8 ‘Tendances récentes en Linguistique générale’ (Recent trends in general linguistics), Journal de Psychologie (1954), 47–51, repr. in PLG 1, pp. 3–17, p. 6.  9 ‘Catégories de pensée et catégories de langues’ (Categories of thinking and categories of languages), Les Études philosophiques 4 (oct–déc. 1958), repr. in PLG 1, pp. 63–74, p. 74. 10 ‘Coup d’œil sur le développement de la linguistique’, PLG 1, p. 26. 11 Ibid., p. 27. 12 ‘De la subjectivité dans le langage’ (On subjectivity in language), Journal de Psychologie (juillet–sep. 1954), repr. in PLG 1, pp. 258–66, p. 259. 13 ‘Structure de la langue et structure de la société’ (Structure of the language and structure of the society), Linguaggi nella società e nella tecnica (Congresso Internazionale Olivetti, Milano, 14–17 ottobre 1968) (Milano: Edizioni di Comunità, 1970), pp. 459–60, repr. in PLG 2, pp. 91–102, p. 96. 14 ‘De la subjectivité’, PLG 1, pp. 259–60. 15 ‘Saussure après un demi-siècle’, PLG 1, pp. 44–5. 16 ‘Structuralisme et linguistique’, PLG 2, p. 15. 17 Ibid., p. 27. 18 Preface to PLG 1, p. 2.

Name Index

Page numbers in bold are for references within Benveniste’s lectures. Aeschylus, 112 Aragon, Louis, x, 22–3, 133 Aristotle, 15, 35, 60n.25, 67, 108 Arnauld, Antoine, 1 Artaud, Antonin, 23, 133 Austin, J. L., 40, 53–4, 58n.13 Authier-Revuz, Jacqueline, 32, 71, 119n.1 Bader, Françoise, 27n.3, 28n.7, 149n.1, 160, 162n.9 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 21, 173 Bally, Charles, 58n.13 Balthus, 3 Barbusse, Henri, x, 166 Barthes, Roland, 21, 29n.20, 36 Bataillon, Marcel, 132, 145 Baudelaire, Charles, 8, 11, 14, 18–20, 28n.18, 29n.27, 124, 159 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 169 Benveniste, Carmelia (sister), ix–x, 24–5, 128, 130, 150n.9, 151n.18, 153n.36, 158, 165 Benveniste, Henri (brother), ix–xi, xiin.2, 3, 167, 177n.2 Benveniste, Maria Malkenson (mother), ix, 22, 27n.1 Benveniste, Mathatias (father), ix–x, 22, 27n.1 Berbérian, Haig, 156n.64 Biardeau, Madeleine, 22 Bloch, Jules, 133, 146, 156n.66 Bloch, Marc, 3, 27n.4 Bloomfield, Leonard, 6, 35, 39–40, 53–4, 121–2, 126n.2

Bopp, Franz, 1 Bourdieu, Pierre, 38, 127n.5 Brasseur, Pierre, 133 Bréal, Michel, 27n.1, 61, 134, 155n.61 Breton, André, x, 23, 133 Brugmann, Karl, 38, 57n.6 Brunot, Ferdinand, 151n.22 Bühler, Karl, 39 Cellard, Jacques, 150n.9 Cézanne, Paul, 168 Chantraine, Pierre, 133, 139, 153n.35, 162n.3 Chatelain, Émile, 133 Chomsky, Noam, 4, 22 Cohen, Marcel, 61, 154n.47 Cohen, Monique, 159–60 Coquet, Jean-Claude, 5, 32, 52, 55, 56n.3, 59n.24, 60n.29, 71, 73n.4, 120n.4&5, 127n.3&6 Crémieux, Benjamin, 3 Culioli, Antoine, 28n.15, 38 Daix, Pierre, 177n.1 Darmesteter, Arsène, 27n.1 Darmesteter, James, 27n.1 D’Arms, Edward F., 139 de Laguna, Grace, 58n.12 Demiéville, Paul, 133, 145, 151n.24, 177n.3 Derrida, Jacques, 29n.20, 36, 47–8, 59n.23–5 Descartes, René, 17 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 175

179

180

Name Index

Dumur, Guy, 178n.7 Duvau, Louis, 134 Eliet, Gaston, 129 Éluard, Paul, x, 23, 133 Emmanuel, Pierre, 3, 135 Engler, Rudolf, 123, 127n.4 Ernst, Max, 133 Esseiva, François, 135 Fenoglio, Irène, 5, 32, 48, 52, 55, 56n.3, 59n.24–5, 73n.2, 157, 159–60 Finot, Louis, 133, 146 Fohalle, René, 133, 153n.35 Frege, Gottlob, 29n.26 Freud, Sigmund, 7, 11, 14, 19, 29n.19 Friedman, Georges, 3 Fussman, Gérard, 159–60 Gauthiot, Robert, 133, 148 Geiger, Bernhard, 133, 152n.30 Giacometti, Alberto, 3 Gide, André, 136 Godel, Robert, 81 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 112 Gourou, Pierre, 156n.64 Greimas, Algirdas Julien, 21, 64 Halpern, Bernard, 130, 151n.18 Hamp, Eric P., 121–2, 126n.1 Harris, Roy, 51, 60n.26 Harris, Zellig S., 6, 22, 39, 53, 60n.27 Hatzfeld, Adolphe, 89n.4 Hawthorn, Harry B., 144, 155n.52 Heidegger, Martin, 19–20, 23 Heraclitus, 5 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 1 Herodotus, 107 Hohenauer, Fr., 149n.2 Homer, 13, 28n.6, 35, 47, 112–13, 115, 151n.23 Hübschmann, Heinrich, 148 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 1 Husserl, Edmund, 7, 14, 17, 23, 44, 67–8 Ivanov, Aleksei Ivanovich, 133, 151n.24 Jakobson, Roman, 18, 21–2, 29n.27, 39, 42, 58n.12, 64, 67, 131, 164, 173–4 James, William, 76

Jeanson, Henri, 134 Joseph, John E., 56n.2, 58n.13, 60n.25–6 Jouve, Pierre-Jean, 3 Kafka, Franz, 153n.39 Kahn, Charles H., 30n.37 Kierkegaard, Sören, 61, 72n.1, 169 Kohzâd, Mohammad Nabi, 137–8 Kristeva, Julia, 28n.11, 29n.23, 32, 59n.24, 60n.25, 130, 155n.55 Kuryłowicz, Jerzy, 133, 153n.35 Lacan, Jacques, 39, 58n.13 Lallot, Jean, 157, 159, 162n.2 Lancelot, Claude, 1 Laplantine, Chloé, 28n.18, 127n.3, 159, 161 Lautréamont (Isidore Lucien Ducasse), 28n.6, 30n.36 Leclant, Jean, 158 Lehmann, Winfred P., 40, 58n.14 Leiris, Michel, 23 Lejeune, Michel, 37, 156n.62 Lévi, Sylvain, 3, 27n.1&3, 132–4, 152n.32 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 18, 29n.27, 36, 156n.64 Lévy-Bruhl, Henri, 3 Lhermitte, François, 24, 130, 150n.9 Locke, John, 6, 76 Malinowski, Bronisław, 40, 53–4, 57n.11, 60n.28 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 19, 23, 30n.36 Martinet, André, 39 Maspéro, Henri, 177n.3 Masson, Olivier, 152n.35 Mayrhofer, Manfred, 156n.66 Meillet, Antoine, xi, 3, 44, 61, 72, 132–4, 146–8, 151n.25–6, 152n.34, 154n.47, 155n.61, 160, 165, 175, 177n.3 Menasce, Fr. Jean de, xi, 24, 130–1, 135, 150n.8,12&15, 153n.38 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 39, 67 Meschonnic, Henri, 32, 56n.2 Milner, Jean-Claude, 25, 155n.55 Minard, Armand, 130, 135 Moïnfar, Mohammed Djafar, 24, 37, 151n.19, 155n.53 Morris, Charles W., 39, 42, 58n.17 Mossé, Fernand, 150n.8

Nadeau, Maurice, 152n.31 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 175 Normand, Claudine, 32, 39, 57n.9, 71 Ogden, C. K., 29n.26 Ono, Aya, 57n.4, 60n.29 Ortega y Gasset, José, 55, 60n.31 Osthoff, Hermann, 38, 57n.6 Pallex, Gabriel, 151n.16 Panofsky, Erwin, 124, 127n.5 Paris, Gaston, 61 Paulhan, Frédéric, 22, 65 Paulhan, Jean, 22, 65 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 6, 8–9, 29n.19, 33, 40–4, 52, 59n.18–20, 76–80, 83, 89n.3,5,6&8, 90n.9–10, 92, 95 Perrot, Jean, 156n.62 Pichon, Édouard, 58n.13 Plato, 15–16, 34–5, 109, 114 Pos, Hendrik Josephus, 7, 44, 67, 73n.6 Queneau, Raymond, 134 Ramus, Petrus, 1 Rask, Rasmus, 1 Rebeyrol, Yvonne, 130 Redard, Georges, 30n.35, 31–2, 37, 72, 128, 149n.1, 154n.43&46, 158–61, 162n.5, 8&10, 165, 176 Redard, Madeleine, 159 Reinach, Salomon, 3 Renou, Louis, 133–5, 153n.35, 155n.56 Rey-Debove, Josette, 21 Richards, I. A., 29n.26 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 18, 27n.6, 152n.30, 168–9 Rimbaud, Arthur, 14

Name Index

181

Robert, Louis, 135, 145, 162n.3 Rodin, Auguste, 168 Roussel, Raymond, 22 Ruwet, Nicholas, 25, 65, 155n.55 St Paul, 13, 114–15 Sapir, Edward, 14, 84, 90n.11 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 4, 6–10, 17, 29n.26, 33–4, 36–7, 40–45, 47, 49–53, 59n.21–2, 64–6, 70, 76, 79–81, 83, 85, 88, 89n.3&5, 91–2, 95, 116–17, 123–6, 134, 136, 152n.29, 169, 172–6 Sauvageot, Serge, 155n.54 Scaliger, Joseph, 1 Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich, 1 Schmidt, Fr. Wilhelm, 135 Schmitt, Alfred, 96 Sebeok, Thomas A., 64 Sjoestedt, Marie-Louise, 133, 136 Sjoestedt, Yvonne, 136 Sollers, Philippe, 21, 29n.20 Sommerfelt, Alf, 133 Starobinski, Jean, 135, 153n.39 Szelagowski, Isabelle, 159 Sznycer, Maurice, 152n.35 Tata family, x, 3, 134 Todorov, Tzvetan, 32, 37, 177n.2 Vendryes, Joseph, x, 61, 132, 136, 145–6, 155–6n.61, 156n.65, 165 Vieuchange, Michel, 134, 136 Wahl, Jean, 72n.1 Welby, Victoria, Lady, 42 Werlen, Iwar, 158 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 39 Wolff, Étienne, 153n.36

Subject Index

abstract (system), 79 abstraction, 10, 92–4 Akkadian, 12, 34, 101, 103, 112, 115 alphabetic writing, 9, 12–13, 18, 34, 48, 91–2, 96, 102–3, 104, 106, 117, 124 alterity see otherness anisomorphic, 17, 84 arbitrary, 7, 79, 82, 88, 172 art, 18, 33 auto-semiotisation, 13, 33–5, 45–8, 106 Bible, 5, 13, 16, 35, 47, 108, 114 Braille, 18, 124 Chinese characters, 12, 14, 48, 100–3, 105, 117 convertibility, 82, 84 cuneiform, 12, 34, 101–3 denomination, 83–4, 111 design, 78 designation, 84, 111 dialogue, 6, 19, 85, 93 discourse, 6–8, 11, 13–14, 17–20, 24, 26, 37, 64–6, 74, 96–7, 99, 105–9, 117–18, 173–5 Egyptian see hieroglyphs engenderment relation, 2, 9, 11, 16–18, 35, 83, 124 enunciation, 7–8, 11–13, 17–19, 29n.19, 31, 35–40, 44–8, 52–5, 58n.13, 61, 67–8, 116, 124–6, 164, 173, 175 experience, 4, 8, 10–11, 16–20, 67, 91, 95, 111

182

film, 75, 78, 86 function(ing), 5, 8, 17, 39, 46, 65–8, 74, 76–7, 82–3, 89, 108 gesture, 75, 78, 124 graphē, phōnē, 12, 92–3, 114 graphic, 10–12, 16, 20, 46–7, 75, 83, 92, 95, 97, 99–103, 106–8, 115 hand and eye, 118 and speech, 15, 118 hieroglyphs, 12, 34, 101–2 homology relation, 18, 35, 114, 124 I/you, 7, 17, 85, 173 icon(ic), 10–11, 69, 77–8, 95, 98, 100, 108 image, 9–10, 12, 14, 46, 53, 86–8, 93–4, 96–8, 101, 106–7 inflection see morphology inner language, 10–11, 14, 18–20, 24, 26, 94–5, 107 institution, language as, 79 integration, 123 intended, 7, 11, 17, 44, 66–8 interpretance relation, 15, 18, 20, 35, 43, 69, 124 interpretant, 9, 19, 29n.19, 33–4, 41–3, 45–6, 77, 80, 83–8, 90n.9, 106, 117, 125, 172 language and writing, 9–18, 21–2, 34–5, 45–8, 59n.22&24, 69–71, 79, 84, 88, 91–111, 114–19 defined, 39, 46, 50–1 langue vs langage, 39, 50–1, 66, 79, 89n.1

langue vs parole, 36–7, 50, 79, 124, 172–3 relation to society, 34, 38, 48, 83–5, 87, 92, 123, 172 linguistics, 5–9, 15, 31, 33, 37, 44–8, 50–1, 74–6, 79–80, 121, 125, 173–6 lived, the, 67 message, 4–5, 11, 18, 47, 96, 99–100, 103, 107–8, 173 money, 75 morphology, 12, 18, 31, 43–4, 65, 104, 117, 125–6 music, 9, 16, 33, 75, 78, 83–4, 86–8, 110–11 nuntial/noncial, 69, 73n.9 objectivisation, 46, 94, 106 otherness, 82, 85 painting, 78, 113, 174 parole see speech; language phenomenology, 2, 7, 14, 23, 44, 68 phonetics and phonology, 43–4, 65, 81, 93, 123, 151n.26 pictographic writing, 11, 97–8, 100, 118 pragmatism, 42, 76 reading, 91, 115–16, 118, 170 reality, 4, 10–11, 20, 67–8, 93, 97 recognising, 15, 86, 103, 106, 110, 115, 119 referent, 12–13, 15–18, 29n.26, 86, 98–9, 101, 108 relay, writing as, 15, 20, 34, 118–19 representation, 10, 16, 20, 34, 86, 91–3, 95–6, 99–100, 103, 105, 117–18, 171 sandhi, 105 scribe, 13–14, 112, 114 scriptor, 99–100 semantic, the, 7–8, 11–15, 19–20, 24, 26, 28n.11, 39, 44, 46, 63–71, 104, 107, 117, 125–6, 154n.43 semiology, 9, 13, 20–21, 33, 42–3, 49, 64, 69, 75–6, 80–1, 119, 123, 126 semiotic, the, 7–8, 10, 13–16, 26, 28n.11, 29n.19, 39, 41–2, 44–6, 63–6, 68–9, 71, 83, 87–8, 92, 100, 107, 117, 124–5, 154n.43

Subject Index

183

semiotics, 33, 42, 65, 76, 87, 104, 125, 154n.43 sentence, 7, 64–7, 87, 103, 124, 175 sign language, 69, 79 significance, 5, 7–20, 23–4, 26, 46, 51–3, 65–6, 68, 74, 86, 88–9, 89n.2 signification, 7, 16, 18–19, 33, 39, 43–4, 46, 51–2, 82, 84, 87–9, 98, 110–11, 114, 119, 121–3 signifier and signified, 7, 12, 14, 44, 53, 87–8, 93, 100–1, 105, 117 speech (parole), 10–12, 15, 19, 34, 37, 44, 47, 50, 79, 84, 86, 91, 94–5, 105–7, 114, 116–19, 124, 172 structuralism, 2, 4, 6, 18, 31, 36–8, 43–6, 48, 50, 173 subject, 1, 7, 11, 17–18, 22n.19, 38, 67, 86, 172 Sumerian see cuneiform Surrealists, x, 3, 11, 23, 28n.6, 134, 166 syllabary, syllabic writing, 14, 34, 48, 100, 103–5, 112 syllables, segmentation into, 12, 103–5 syntagmation, 7, 20, 65 syntax, 14, 17–18, 65–6, 86, 106 system, 6, 8–10, 15–18, 20, 31, 33–6, 40–5, 48–53, 64, 69, 75, 78–88, 92, 95–6, 99–108, 110, 114–15, 117–19, 121–5, 172, 174 thinking and signs, 41, 78 and speech, 10–11, 20, 34, 91, 93–5, 170–1 and writing, 10–11, 20, 34, 91, 93–5 traffic signals, 33, 69, 75, 82 translation, 43, 49–56, 99, 108, 174 truth, 5, 16, 68, 121 understanding, 13, 15, 119 utterance, 7, 38, 40, 44, 53–5, 67, 100, 102, 105–7, 119, 122, 126, 172–4 verb, 67–8, 173 voice, 12, 93–4, 110, 116, 118 word, 7, 9–10, 12, 14, 19, 34, 41, 43–4, 48, 65–7, 77–9, 87, 93–4, 102–4, 106–7, 114, 122, 170, 174 writing, 2, 6, 9–20, 34–5, 45–8, 59n.22&24, 62–3, 69–71, 79, 83–4, 88, 91–119, 121, 124, 170