Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969

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.

Table of Contents:
Editors’ AcknowledgmentsBiographical TimelineTranslator’s Introduction, John E. JosephPreface: Émile Benveniste, a linguist who neither says nor hides, but signifies, Julia KristevaEditor’s Introduction, Jean-Claude Coquet and Irène FenoglioChapter One: SemiologyChapter Two: Languages and WritingChapter Three: Final Lecture, Final NotesAnnex 1: Bio-bibliography of Émile Benveniste, Georges RedardAnnex 2: The Émile Benveniste Papers, Émilie BrunetAfterword: Émile Benveniste, a scholar’s fate, Tzvetan TodorovIndex

About the Author :
Émile Benveniste (1902-1976) was a French linguist and semiotician and he was Professor of Linguistics at the Collège de France until 1969. His authored works include Problems in General Linguistics published in English in 1973 by the University of Miami Press and the Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society published in English in 2016 by HAU. Jean-Claude Coquet is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Semiotics in the Université de Paris 8. 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 at the University of Edinburgh and currently holds a three-year Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. His previous book, Language and Identity (2004) has found a wide readership among sociologists, political scientists, historians, anthropologists and others besides linguists, many of whom will want to read his Language and Politics as its successor and complement.

Review :
Thanks to the efforts of Irène Fenoglio and Jean-Claude Coquet, Benveniste's last lectures have been made accessible to a large audience. [...] an accurate, elegant and highly readable translation. 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.