Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969

by Émile Benveniste, John E. Joseph (Translator), Jean-Claude Coquet (Editor)

Benveniste’s lectures had a shaping influence on a generation of scholars that includes Barthes, Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva and Todorov and here, for the first time, these are made available in English for a new generation of linguists and philosophers of language. 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 December 1969. Benveniste’s work as offered here presents the first serious attempt at reconciling the sign theories of Saussure and Peirce and draws together, language, writing and society into a comprehensive theory of signifying. Benveniste’s philosophy of language considers key concepts such as utterance, enunciation, speaker, discourse, subjectivity and as such is central to the areas of discourse analysis, text linguistics, pragmatics, semantics, conversational analysis, stylistics and semiotics.

196 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2012

About the author

Émile Benveniste (French: [bɛ̃venist]; 27 March 1902 – 3 October 1976) was a French structural linguist and semiotician. He is best known for his work on Indo-European languages and his critical reformulation of the linguistic paradigm established by Ferdinand de Saussure.