Last Lectures

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 Coll?ge 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.

Émile Benveniste was a giant whose influence has been felt across semiotics and linguistics. Yet, as John E. Joseph says in the Introduction to his much anticipated magisterial translation of Benveniste?s final lectures, many have "seen his work referred to reverentially, but have not necessarily read it themselves". Ranging across language, writing and general semiology, the sixteen lectures presented here, along with notes for a seventeenth, will serve as a coruscating introduction for the uninitiated Anglophone and as a reminder of the greatness of Benveniste for the already converted.