Émile Benveniste - Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969

Last Lectures:
Collège de
France
1968 and
1969
ÉmILE
BeNveNIsTe
EDIT ED by
JeA N- Cl Au De CoqueT
a nD Ir èN e FeNogl Io
Tr A Nsl AT eD by
Joh N e. JosePh
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

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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

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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 1
Julia Kristeva
Translator’s Introduction 31
John E. Joseph
Editors’ Introduction 61
Jean-Claude Coquet and Irène Fenoglio
1 Semiology 74
2 Languages and Writing 91
3 Final Lecture, Final Notes 121
Annex 1: Bio-bibliography of Émile Benveniste 128

Georges Redard
Annex 2: The Émile Benveniste Papers 157
Émilie Brunet
Afterword: Émile Benveniste, a Scholar’s Fate 163
Tzvetan Todorov
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 excep-
tional 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 responsibil-
ity 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 semi-

nary’ 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
x Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969
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 qualifica-
tion), 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, con-
damnez-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 Indo-
European, 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).
xii Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969
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 defini-
tion so as to put Émile Benveniste (1902–1976) into the per-
spective 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 ‘his-
toricism’ 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 over-
shadow the fact that it was also a period of exceptional explora-
tion of how language figures at the heart of the human condition:
the central activity is the language which conditions, contains
1
2 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 pre-
figure 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 twenty-
first 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 connois-
seur 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 sym-
pathisers, and he notably crossed paths with the Surrealists. He
left for India in 1924 as tutor in a family of wealthy industrial-
ists, 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 par-
ticipated 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
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 epis-
temological 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 deter-
mine 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 function-
ing of language: ‘this signifies’ is synonymous for him with ‘this
speaks’, and so it is without recourse to any ‘external’ or ‘tran-
scendental 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 speak-
ing 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 secularisa-
tion, 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 ‘signifi-
ance’ 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 phi-
losophy of language, but as a bearer of ‘truth’, meaning is not
really the problem of linguists, Benveniste reminds us. Meaning
is left ‘outside linguistics’:9 either ‘discarded’ because suspected

of being too subjectivist, fleeting, indescribable by aspects of lin-
guistic form; or recognised but ‘reduced’ (Leonard Bloomfield,
Zellig Harris) to morphosyntactic structural variants, ‘distri-
butional’, 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 recogni-
tion, 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 share-
able 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 theo-
retician 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 enuncia-
tion 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 motiva-
tion 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 phenomeno-
logical ‘intention’ of Husserl, whose thought influences certain
linguists such as Hendrik Josephus Pos). It is defined by a rela-
tionship 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 situa-
tion 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
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 simultane-
ously 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 metase-
miotics 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 numer-
ous 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
have developed across history. Taking care however to empha-

sise 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 inti-
mate’ 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 (ges-
tural, 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, trans-
mitting, communicating messages). The ‘first great abstraction’,
writing, by making language into a ‘distinct reality’, detached
from its contextual and circumstantial richness, allows speaker-
writers 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’, con-
fronts 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 elab-
oration 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 rep-
resentation’, 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 seman-
tic 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 lan-
guage 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 particu-
larity more marked in certain modern writing systems (numeri-
cal, 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
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 disambigu-
ate 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 higher-
level segmentation. For polysyllabic languages, it will be seg-
mentation 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 ety-
mological 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 becom-
ing 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 experi-
ences 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 deval-
orisation, 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 com-
munication – 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
intermediary of translations from Latin into the vernacular

languages) and other sign systems which widen the auto-
semiotisation of language in a secularised civilisation enhance
its capacity for engendering meaning, and predispose the sub-
jectivities 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 com-
municants, 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 trig-
gers 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’ narrativ-
ity, 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 ‘signify-
ing 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 ‘lin-
guistic process’, writing is ‘the founding act’ which has ‘trans-
formed 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 condi-
tion 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 lan-
guage, there intervenes a recollection of Plato’s Philebus: within
the variety of human sensations and pleasures, each One is an
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 conno-
tations 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 refer-
ent 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 signifi-
ance 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’ condi-
tions 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 ‘dis-
course’ 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 condi-
tion 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 cul-
tural determination’, had certainly been proclaimed previously
(PLG 2, p. 68). But through writing, the Last Lectures deepen
the ‘engenderment’ of signifiance by displacing subjective expe-
rience 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: ‘engen-
derment’, but also ‘functioning’, ‘conversion’ of the language
into writing and into discourse, ‘diversification’; the language
being defined as ‘production’, ‘moving landscape’, ‘place of
transformations’. But contrary to the ‘transformations’ which

interest generative grammars and for which syntactic catego-
ries 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 ‘cor-
respondences’). 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 appara-
tus 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 ‘unconven-
tional’ 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 lan-
guage ‘transmits’ but does not ‘describe’.29 Similarly, the referent
of poetic language is ‘inside the expression’, whereas in every-
day 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 reflec-
tions 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 infra-
and 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 pro-
posed 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
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 dis-
tance 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; communica-
tive, 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 share-
able in the ‘interpretance’ of the language itself. Neither insti-
tutional 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 dan-
gerous 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 cur-
rents 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 gov-
ernment scholarship, I had the privilege, along with the linguist
Josette Rey-Debove, of being put in charge of the scientific sec-
retariat 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 imme-
morial 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
‘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 lan-
guages (‘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 appro-
priate 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 ‘senefi-
ance’ 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 per-
mitted 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 intellectu-
als, 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 confer-
ence 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 Stalinist-
Trotskyite 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 priest-
hood to signifiance in the logics of language. Academic conven-
tion provided this nomad tempted by the conflagration, this
‘poor linguist scattered in the universe’, with a protection and
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 signifi-
ance: 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 establish-
ment – 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 administra-
tive 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 coop-
erative. 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 anti-
quarian 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 24-9-
1971: 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
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 unpronouncea-
ble 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) ‘tran-
scends’ (/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 envi-
ronment of his early childhood included Turkish, Arabic, Modern
Greek, probably Slavic. Many great linguists of the late nine-
teenth 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 lin-
guistes (trop) oubliés (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010), pp. 141–70.
4 The signers urged the UGIF ‘to maintain as close a union as pos-
sible 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 faith-
ful’. 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 insti-
tutions 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 mater-
nal that is vigorous and ‘robust as a man’, Benveniste composed
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 freud-
ienne’ (Remarks on the function of language in Freud’s discov-
ery), 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 mas-
culine 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’.]
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.
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’.
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 linguis-
tic 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.

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
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
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 ques-
tion 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 con-
stitute 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
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-semioti-
sation 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 lan-
guage, 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 imag-
ined 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 world-
wide, 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
the enunciation and its written representation. Each relation-

ship is based on a different semiotics – and yet, in every case,
‘the writing system has always and everywhere been the instru-
ment 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 ‘homol-
ogy’, 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.
Languages, Signification and Enunciation

In France from the 1930s until the mid 1960s, Benveniste was
a linguist’s linguist, producing work highly valued by Indo-
Europeanists 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 devel-
oped based on its principles.
The great success of Tristes tropiques (1955) by the ethnolo-
gist 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-struc-
turalism’ 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 abandon-
ing 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 dis-
tinguished from parole, the spoken (or written or signed) output
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 paral-
lel 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 lin-
guistique 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 post-
1969 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 independ-
ent 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
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 structur-
alist 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 enuncia-
tion 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 pro-
vides 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.
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 ‘seman-
tic’ 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 excep-
tion of Zellig Harris (1909–1992) and his work on discourse
analysis, a term which Harris is credited with originating. It
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 enuncia-
tion 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 signifi-
cantly 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
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, pre-
senting 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 complexi-
fied, 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
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 coin-
cidental 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 extend-
ing 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 indica-
tion 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 com-
bines 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
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 particu-
lar 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 systematic-
ity 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 teach-
ing 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 differenti-
ates a phoneme from a non-speech sound is some sort of signi-
fication that this is a signifying sound.
This is where Peirce’s idea of ‘interpretance’ offers a valu-
able 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.
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 broad-
est impact through his Vocabulaire des institutions indo-
européennes, 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 meth-
odological scruples whereby he, as a grammarian (the term he
usually applied to himself), could only pronounce on the semi-
otic, 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
Structural linguistics is based on the Saussurean order, which

excludes consideration of writing. The new linguistics of enun-
ciation 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 intro-

duced 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 consti-
tutes 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
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-semiot-
isation. 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 lan-
guage 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 under-
standing 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 objec-
tivise 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
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 distri-
bution across space and endurance through time. If these char-
acteristics depended upon writing, the Homeric epics would not
have been possible, nor the Bible, which begins with two differ-
ent 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, identi-
ties, 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
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 lit-
eracy and the relationship of writing to auto-semiotisation. He
might have talked about how his approach did or did not artic-
ulate 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 struc-
turalism, 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-structur-
alist, 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.
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 target-
language 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 butch-
ery is going to use mouton throughout, but the English transla-
tor 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.
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 counter-
parts 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 lin-
guistics, 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.
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 sig-
nifiance. 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 signi-
fier, 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.
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 special-
ised 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 ‘significa-
tion’ 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 por-

teuses 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 signification-

bearing. 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 innova-
tion 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
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 con-
cepts end up failing. This was the case with Saussure’s efforts
over many years to talk about the component parts of the lin-
guistic 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 some-
thing 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
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 discus-
sion 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 ren-
dering énonciation either as ‘enunciation’, with the risk of its
being read in its usual sense of careful elocution, or as ‘utter-

ance’, 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 interpreta-
tion 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, eve-

rything 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
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 pre-
ferred. 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 enunciation-
haunted 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: anthro-
pologie 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 continu-
ity 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
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 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).
8 This is also stated in Benveniste, ‘Structure de la langue et struc-
ture 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.
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 phi-
losophie analytique, Cahiers de Royaumont (Paris: Éditions de
Minuit, 1962), pp. 271–304. An English version, ‘Performative-
Constative’, 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 cri-
tique of Bally by Édouard Pichon (Les principes de la suffixation
en Français, Paris: d’Artrey, 1942). Whereas Bally treats enuncia-
tion 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 lin-
guistic 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
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 con-
sequences 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 ‘teratologi-
cal’ (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
“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 defini-
tive 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 sémio-
tiques–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 par-
ticularly 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 consider-
able 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 linguis-
tique 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
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 acces-
sible 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 Indo-
European languages, even very ancient or little-known ones
(Tocharian, Hittite, Old Persian, Avestan, Ossetian, Sogdian,
etc.), specialist in comparative grammar and innovating theo-
retician 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 theoreti-
cal style of the author of the PLG, we are beginning to glimpse
the researcher’s dimensions and orientations, but we had for-
gotten the teacher’s dynamism and solidity. Now, if the scholar
discovers and develops an ever more detailed knowledge of spe-
cific linguistic spaces, if the researcher constructs, article after
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 lin-
guist’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 theoreti-
cian writes and publishes ‘Sémiologie de la langue’, an article in
which he makes explicit the cardinal concept of the dyad ‘semi-
otic/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
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 sym-
posium 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 dis-
tinction 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 ques-
tion 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 irreduc-
ible 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
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 princi-
ple of “meaning” and of the semantic is the principle of discur-
sive 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 neces-
sary 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 repeti-
tion 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’.
Presuppositions
Amongst the points to cover listed by Benveniste in his prepara-
tory 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 seman-
tic ‘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 cor-
responding concepts.’ This hierarchical (and genetic) concep-
tion 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’.
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 enunci-
ate 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 par-
allel 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
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 dif-
ferent 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.
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 lec-

tures 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 hand-
writing, ‘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’.
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 succes-
sion]: ‘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 coher-
ent 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

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 aca-
demic 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 manu-
scripts 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
taken by the attendees allow us to re-establish the order of

their reading by Benveniste since they follow what was actu-
ally 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 pre-
paratory 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 biogra-
phy 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 dona-
tion 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 exem-
plary 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
de Recherche Scientifique/École Normale Supérieure), directed by

Irène Fenoglio, has used this archive for developing its research on
linguists’ manuscripts.
3 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.
4 Jean-Claude Coquet notes that Benveniste ‘consented’ to being
president of the Cercle de sémiotique whilst insisting that ‘sémi-
ologie 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).
5 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.
6 H. J. Pos, ‘Phénoménologie et linguistique’, Revue internationale
de philosophie 1/2 (1939), 354–65, 357.
7 [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’.]
8 Ms. note for the article ‘Sémiologie de la langue’, BnF PAP OR
53, env. 221, f. 104.
9 [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.]
10 The preparatory notes for this course are filed as PAP OR 40, env.
80, ff. 1–239.
11 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 lin-
guistics’. 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 question-
ing 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 lan-

guage (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 fore-
ground: 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 semi-
ology. 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 con-
stitute 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 disci-
pline: semiology.
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 cer-
tainly 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 relation-
ship 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 reflec-
tion 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 pro-
ceeds 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,
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 logico-
mathematical 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 think-
ing, 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 sym-
bolic 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.
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 estab-
lishing relationships amongst objects, no science is possible
outside of language.
Peirce ultimately makes the sign the basis of the entire uni-
verse. 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 classifi-
able 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 semiologi-
cal 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 linguis-
tique 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?
It is because the entire system exists only insofar as it repre-

sents, 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 conven-
tional, ‘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 gener-

ating 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 interpre-
tation. 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 them-
selves; 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
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 rela-
tion 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.
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 some-

thing 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 combina-
tions, 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 ‘narra-
tive’, 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 sig-
nification 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 break-
ing 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?
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 signification-
bearing. 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
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 con-
stantly, 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
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 ‘pho-
netic’, 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 lan-
guage. The complete activity that speakers engage in, the ges-
tural 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
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 lan-
guage 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 think-
ing, 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, memorial-
ised. Writing is a transposition of inner language, and it is nec-
essary 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 under-

stands 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 subordi-

nate 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 paral-
lel 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
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 princi-
pal 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

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 search-

ing 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 represent-
ing graphically the object of the discourse or of their thinking,
which is to say the referent. The ‘natural’ tendency is to commu-
nicate 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 ana-
lytic. 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 productiv-
ity of possible messages imposes a limit on notation, and this
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 dis-
tinct 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 five-
pointed 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 homo-
phones. 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
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 devel-
opment) 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 cor-
responds to the linguistic structure. Concerning the historical
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 alterna-
tions 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 gram-
matical, 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
Languages and Writing: Eleventh Lecture 105
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 articula-
tion 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 rela-
tion 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.
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 stop-

ping 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 exclu-
sive 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 seman-
tic 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 ele-
ments (‘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 rela-
tionship presupposes ‘values’ enunciated and ordered by the
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 representa-
tive 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 ele-
ments (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 lan-

guage and writing in Plato, not in the too famous Cratylus, but
in the Philebus. To appreciate the full thrust of Plato’s observa-
tions 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
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 function-
ing. 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 expres-
sion. 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 designa-
tion 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
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 Cretan-
Mycenaean 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.
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 lan-
guage 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
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, čitati, ‘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:
−− 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 (for-
mally) 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, charac-
teristic 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,
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 dis-
course 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 sec-
ondary 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 under-
stood, 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’.
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.]
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 particu-
larly occupied us.
It becomes all the more necessary to pursue the study of
meaning as this study is now in more favourable objective cir-
cumstances 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 recog-
nised 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
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.
Final Lecture, Final Notes 123
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 nothing-
ness, by which I mean that we could not face such an imagining:
a humanity that did not have language and that would never-
theless 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 any-

thing, 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.
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 semi-
otic 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
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 opposi-

tions 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 pho-
nemes, essentially non-signifying.
To this system is opposed another system (is it really a
system?) in the language:6 the semantic, the system of meaning-
fulness 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 semi-

otic, which is applied to closed inventories, and depends
on criteria of distinctiveness, more or less elaborated. To
this world belong also morphological consonantal altern-
ances, the distinction which appears in several Amerindian
languages between two consonantal series for the categories
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 enun-
ciation: the semantic.
The Saussurean doctrine covers, under the species of languages,

only the semiotisable part of the language, its material inven-
tory. 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 inflec-
tional 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 lan-
guage itself, and since the language appears to me as a moving
landscape (it is the site of transformations) and since it is com-
posed 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.]
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 (cor-
rection 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 mistak-
enly left unitalicised in the French edition of 2012 (correction by
J.-C. Coquet).]
7 [Tr.: ‘meaningfulness’ here translates le vouloir-dire, the nominal-
ised 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 docu-
ment, 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, para-
graph 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 suf-
fered 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 con-
stitution, 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 ques-
tion’ (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 some-
what 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 grind-
stone, 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,
for a flu vaccination. Leaving the restaurant where he had lunch

afterwards, he collapsed, struck down by an attack. The ambu-
lance took him to the Hospital Ambroise-Paré in Boulogne-sur-
Seine, 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, recog-
nised on the contrary his progressive return to consciousness.
On 24 December, Father Jean de Menasce, his friend and con-
temporary 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 typo-
graphical 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 phi-
losophy 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 archaeolo-
gists 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 trans-
ferred from one hospital to another, enduring these barracks of
human decay, most of them dilapidated, noisy to the point of
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 Porte-
de-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 col-
leagues 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 vol-
unteered 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 supervi-
sion, 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 lan-
guages 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,
H. Jeanson, R. Queneau and others, signs the Surrealist mani-

festo ‘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 mili-
tary 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
Annex 1 135
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 main-
tained 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 informa-
tion. He certainly frequented the Anthropos Institute, estab-
lished 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 after-
math of his exile. His flat in the rue Méchain was occupied
after having been looted. L. Renou and L. Robert had suc-
ceeded in putting the bulk of his library in a safe place, but all
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 declara-
tion of war) – all too infrequent occasions to hear him treat the
most diverse subjects in the most savoury manner. At the Park-
Otel 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
Annex 1 137
Communist Party or any other organisation advocating over-

throw 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 crite-
rion 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 trans-
late? 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 prov-
ince, 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
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 horse-
back). 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, arriv-
ing 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 note-
books and is nearly ready for print.45
But Benveniste was more and more desirous of ‘leaving’ Indo-
European and studying at first hand a language in which the
categories familiar to us are completely lacking, with a struc-
ture 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
Annex 1 139
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 popula-
tion. These are fishermen whose life and culture are hardly differ-
ent 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
of Haines and Klukwan. It may be useful to point out that the

Tlingit have the reputation of being the most resistant to investiga-
tion 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 institu-
tions such as the potlatch, which have been so abundantly com-
mented 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 combina-

tion 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 dis-
tribution 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 borrow-
ings from other languages and attest to ancient relationships.
At the start of August [Sunday the 2nd], I went from Haines-
Klukwan 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 consti-
tutes 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
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 lan-
guage 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 universi-
ties 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 rail-
ways in the interior, and the progress in education and accultura-
tion amongst the Indians.
Annex 1 143
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
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 desper-
ate 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 whirl-
ing. 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 pen-
etrated 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 poign-
ancy. [. . .] 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 recogni-
tion 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 cer-
emony that was both moving and marked by the greatest sim-
plicity’,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 presi-
dent 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.
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 pub-
lished 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 judge-
ment, 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 occu-
pied 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 pre-
sented 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
Annex 1 147
ourselves from the start ‘to incurring the double reproach of

being inferior and incomplete’.65
At first glance, one discerns three domains of activity: Indo-
European, 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 hyper-
criticism 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 con-
tinuity 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, vocab-
ulary 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 res-
titution 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)
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 muta-
tion, the transitive and intransitive in the construction of the
participle. [. . .] Above all, he added considerably to the inven-
tory 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 par-
ticular 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 sténogra-
phie, 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
Annex 1 149
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.
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 reor-
ganise 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,
Annex 1 151
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, includ-
ing 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.
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 belong-
ing to the Semiticist Maurice Sznycer, which bears on the cover
page: ‘To myself, 5 April 1928, É. Benveniste’, then the signatures
Annex 1 153
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 conver-
sation 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 indo-
européen (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.
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 dialec-
tologie 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 inter-
national 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.]
Annex 1 155
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), field-
work 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,
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, some-
times 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’indo-
aryen (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 indo-
européennes 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 charm-
ing 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
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 institu-
tion 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 some-
thing 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-
Annex 2 159
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 linguis-
tics, 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
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 per-
sonal 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 foot-
steps of Irène Fenoglio, who had begun her research by consult-
ing 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 com-
pleted 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 docu-
ments 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.
Annex 2 161
. . . 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 Saint-
Germain-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 indo-
européennes’ (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 documenta-
tion (correspondence, donation certificates, inventories) attest-
ing 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
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, pro-
fessors 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 dia-
lects 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 collec-
tions 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 bio-
graphical 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 per-
fectly 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
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 con-
siderably 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 inter-
mediary 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, enun-
ciation, 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 hos-
pital, 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
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 sub-
sistence seem meagre. At the Rabbinical School he holds a schol-
arship. 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 addi-

tion 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 reha-
bilitation 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 suc-
cessive 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 vaca-
tions. When he leaves his work table, it is to go to participate
in a scholarly meeting or take himself ‘into the field’ to describe
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 north-
west 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 com-
munion 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 pen-
etrated 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, compara-
tive 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
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 con-
tinue 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 sug-
gestive 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 contribu-
tions) 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 enlighten-
ing 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
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 repre-
sentations 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 lan-
guage.’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 designa-
tions 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 concep-
tion, 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
utterance by the discourse instance, which attests to the anchor-

ing 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 produc-
tion, 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 transla-
tion 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 differ-
ent 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 dis-
courses 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 impres-
sion. On the one hand, a series of remarkable intuitions, new
insights, promising ideas; on the other, a feeling of incom-
pleteness, 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
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 com-
prehensible 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 lec-
tures. 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 interven-
tion 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 sur-
prised 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 inher-
ent 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 com-
pletely 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 frag-
mentary 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.
5 Preface to PLG 1, pp. 1–2, p. 1.

6 ‘Coup d’œil sur le développement de la linguistique’ (The devel-
opment 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 Bopp, Franz, 1

Aragon, Louis, x, 22–3, 133 Bourdieu, Pierre, 38, 127n.5
Aristotle, 15, 35, 60n.25, 67, 108 Brasseur, Pierre, 133
Arnauld, Antoine, 1 Bréal, Michel, 27n.1, 61, 134,
Artaud, Antonin, 23, 133 155n.61
Austin, J. L., 40, 53–4, 58n.13 Breton, André, x, 23, 133
Authier-Revuz, Jacqueline, 32, 71, Brugmann, Karl, 38, 57n.6
119n.1 Brunot, Ferdinand, 151n.22
Bühler, Karl, 39
Bader, Françoise, 27n.3, 28n.7, 149n.1,
160, 162n.9 Cellard, Jacques, 150n.9
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 21, 173 Cézanne, Paul, 168
Bally, Charles, 58n.13 Chantraine, Pierre, 133, 139, 153n.35,
Balthus, 3 162n.3
Barbusse, Henri, x, 166 Chatelain, Émile, 133
Barthes, Roland, 21, 29n.20, 36 Chomsky, Noam, 4, 22
Bataillon, Marcel, 132, 145 Cohen, Marcel, 61, 154n.47
Baudelaire, Charles, 8, 11, 14, 18–20, Cohen, Monique, 159–60
28n.18, 29n.27, 124, 159 Coquet, Jean-Claude, 5, 32, 52, 55,
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 169 56n.3, 59n.24, 60n.29, 71, 73n.4,
Benveniste, Carmelia (sister), ix–x, 120n.4&5, 127n.3&6
24–5, 128, 130, 150n.9, 151n.18, Crémieux, Benjamin, 3
153n.36, 158, 165 Culioli, Antoine, 28n.15, 38
Benveniste, Henri (brother), ix–xi,
xiin.2, 3, 167, 177n.2 Daix, Pierre, 177n.1
Benveniste, Maria Malkenson (mother), Darmesteter, Arsène, 27n.1
ix, 22, 27n.1 Darmesteter, James, 27n.1
Benveniste, Mathatias (father), ix–x, 22, D’Arms, Edward F., 139
27n.1 de Laguna, Grace, 58n.12
Berbérian, Haig, 156n.64 Demiéville, Paul, 133, 145, 151n.24,
Biardeau, Madeleine, 22 177n.3
Bloch, Jules, 133, 146, 156n.66 Derrida, Jacques, 29n.20, 36, 47–8,
Bloch, Marc, 3, 27n.4 59n.23–5
Bloomfield, Leonard, 6, 35, 39–40, Descartes, René, 17
53–4, 121–2, 126n.2 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 175
179
180 Name Index
Dumur, Guy, 178n.7 Jeanson, Henri, 134

Duvau, Louis, 134 Joseph, John E., 56n.2, 58n.13,
60n.25–6
Eliet, Gaston, 129 Jouve, Pierre-Jean, 3
Éluard, Paul, x, 23, 133
Emmanuel, Pierre, 3, 135 Kafka, Franz, 153n.39
Engler, Rudolf, 123, 127n.4 Kahn, Charles H., 30n.37
Ernst, Max, 133 Kierkegaard, Sören, 61, 72n.1, 169
Esseiva, François, 135 Kohzâd, Mohammad Nabi, 137–8
Kristeva, Julia, 28n.11, 29n.23, 32,
Fenoglio, Irène, 5, 32, 48, 52, 55, 59n.24, 60n.25, 130, 155n.55
56n.3, 59n.24–5, 73n.2, 157, Kuryłowicz, Jerzy, 133, 153n.35
159–60
Finot, Louis, 133, 146 Lacan, Jacques, 39, 58n.13
Fohalle, René, 133, 153n.35 Lallot, Jean, 157, 159, 162n.2
Frege, Gottlob, 29n.26 Lancelot, Claude, 1
Freud, Sigmund, 7, 11, 14, 19, 29n.19 Laplantine, Chloé, 28n.18, 127n.3, 159,
Friedman, Georges, 3 161
Fussman, Gérard, 159–60 Lautréamont (Isidore Lucien Ducasse),
28n.6, 30n.36
Gauthiot, Robert, 133, 148 Leclant, Jean, 158
Geiger, Bernhard, 133, 152n.30 Lehmann, Winfred P., 40, 58n.14
Giacometti, Alberto, 3 Leiris, Michel, 23
Gide, André, 136 Lejeune, Michel, 37, 156n.62
Godel, Robert, 81 Lévi, Sylvain, 3, 27n.1&3, 132–4,
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 112 152n.32
Gourou, Pierre, 156n.64 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 18, 29n.27, 36,
Greimas, Algirdas Julien, 21, 64 156n.64
Lévy-Bruhl, Henri, 3
Halpern, Bernard, 130, 151n.18 Lhermitte, François, 24, 130, 150n.9
Hamp, Eric P., 121–2, 126n.1 Locke, John, 6, 76
Harris, Roy, 51, 60n.26
Harris, Zellig S., 6, 22, 39, 53, 60n.27 Malinowski, Bronisław, 40, 53–4,
Hatzfeld, Adolphe, 89n.4 57n.11, 60n.28
Hawthorn, Harry B., 144, 155n.52 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 19, 23, 30n.36
Heidegger, Martin, 19–20, 23 Martinet, André, 39
Heraclitus, 5 Maspéro, Henri, 177n.3
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 1 Masson, Olivier, 152n.35
Herodotus, 107 Mayrhofer, Manfred, 156n.66
Hohenauer, Fr., 149n.2 Meillet, Antoine, xi, 3, 44, 61, 72,
Homer, 13, 28n.6, 35, 47, 112–13, 115, 132–4, 146–8, 151n.25–6, 152n.34,
151n.23 154n.47, 155n.61, 160, 165, 175,
Hübschmann, Heinrich, 148 177n.3
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 1 Menasce, Fr. Jean de, xi, 24, 130–1, 135,
Husserl, Edmund, 7, 14, 17, 23, 44, 150n.8,12&15, 153n.38
67–8 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 39, 67
Meschonnic, Henri, 32, 56n.2
Ivanov, Aleksei Ivanovich, 133, 151n.24 Milner, Jean-Claude, 25, 155n.55
Minard, Armand, 130, 135
Jakobson, Roman, 18, 21–2, 29n.27, Moïnfar, Mohammed Djafar, 24, 37,
39, 42, 58n.12, 64, 67, 131, 164, 151n.19, 155n.53
173–4 Morris, Charles W., 39, 42, 58n.17
James, William, 76 Mossé, Fernand, 150n.8
Name Index 181
Nadeau, Maurice, 152n.31 Robert, Louis, 135, 145, 162n.3

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 175 Rodin, Auguste, 168
Normand, Claudine, 32, 39, 57n.9, 71 Roussel, Raymond, 22
Ruwet, Nicholas, 25, 65, 155n.55
Ogden, C. K., 29n.26
Ono, Aya, 57n.4, 60n.29 St Paul, 13, 114–15
Ortega y Gasset, José, 55, 60n.31 Sapir, Edward, 14, 84, 90n.11
Osthoff, Hermann, 38, 57n.6 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 4, 6–10,
17, 29n.26, 33–4, 36–7, 40–45,
Pallex, Gabriel, 151n.16 47, 49–53, 59n.21–2, 64–6, 70,
Panofsky, Erwin, 124, 127n.5 76, 79–81, 83, 85, 88, 89n.3&5,
Paris, Gaston, 61 91–2, 95, 116–17, 123–6, 134, 136,
Paulhan, Frédéric, 22, 65 152n.29, 169, 172–6
Paulhan, Jean, 22, 65 Sauvageot, Serge, 155n.54
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 6, 8–9, 29n.19, Scaliger, Joseph, 1
33, 40–4, 52, 59n.18–20, 76–80, 83, Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich, 1
89n.3,5,6&8, 90n.9–10, 92, 95 Schmidt, Fr. Wilhelm, 135
Perrot, Jean, 156n.62 Schmitt, Alfred, 96
Pichon, Édouard, 58n.13 Sebeok, Thomas A., 64
Plato, 15–16, 34–5, 109, 114 Sjoestedt, Marie-Louise, 133, 136
Pos, Hendrik Josephus, 7, 44, 67, Sjoestedt, Yvonne, 136
73n.6 Sollers, Philippe, 21, 29n.20
Sommerfelt, Alf, 133
Queneau, Raymond, 134 Starobinski, Jean, 135, 153n.39
Szelagowski, Isabelle, 159
Ramus, Petrus, 1 Sznycer, Maurice, 152n.35
Rask, Rasmus, 1
Rebeyrol, Yvonne, 130 Tata family, x, 3, 134
Redard, Georges, 30n.35, 31–2, 37, 72, Todorov, Tzvetan, 32, 37, 177n.2
128, 149n.1, 154n.43&46, 158–61,
162n.5, 8&10, 165, 176 Vendryes, Joseph, x, 61, 132, 136,
Redard, Madeleine, 159 145–6, 155–6n.61, 156n.65, 165
Reinach, Salomon, 3 Vieuchange, Michel, 134, 136
Renou, Louis, 133–5, 153n.35, 155n.56
Rey-Debove, Josette, 21 Wahl, Jean, 72n.1
Richards, I. A., 29n.26 Welby, Victoria, Lady, 42
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 18, 27n.6, Werlen, Iwar, 158
152n.30, 168–9 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 39
Rimbaud, Arthur, 14 Wolff, Étienne, 153n.36
Subject Index
abstract (system), 79 film, 75, 78, 86

abstraction, 10, 92–4 function(ing), 5, 8, 17, 39, 46, 65–8, 74,
Akkadian, 12, 34, 101, 103, 112, 115 76–7, 82–3, 89, 108
alphabetic writing, 9, 12–13, 18, 34, 48,
91–2, 96, 102–3, 104, 106, 117, gesture, 75, 78, 124
124 graphē, phōnē, 12, 92–3, 114
alterity see otherness graphic, 10–12, 16, 20, 46–7, 75, 83,
anisomorphic, 17, 84 92, 95, 97, 99–103, 106–8, 115
arbitrary, 7, 79, 82, 88, 172
art, 18, 33 hand
auto-semiotisation, 13, 33–5, 45–8, and eye, 118
106 and speech, 15, 118
hieroglyphs, 12, 34, 101–2
Bible, 5, 13, 16, 35, 47, 108, 114 homology relation, 18, 35, 114, 124
Braille, 18, 124
I/you, 7, 17, 85, 173
Chinese characters, 12, 14, 48, 100–3, icon(ic), 10–11, 69, 77–8, 95, 98, 100, 108
105, 117 image, 9–10, 12, 14, 46, 53, 86–8, 93–4,
convertibility, 82, 84 96–8, 101, 106–7
cuneiform, 12, 34, 101–3 inflection see morphology
inner language, 10–11, 14, 18–20, 24,
denomination, 83–4, 111 26, 94–5, 107
design, 78 institution, language as, 79
designation, 84, 111 integration, 123
dialogue, 6, 19, 85, 93 intended, 7, 11, 17, 44, 66–8
discourse, 6–8, 11, 13–14, 17–20, 24, interpretance relation, 15, 18, 20, 35,
26, 37, 64–6, 74, 96–7, 99, 105–9, 43, 69, 124
117–18, 173–5 interpretant, 9, 19, 29n.19, 33–4, 41–3,
45–6, 77, 80, 83–8, 90n.9, 106,
Egyptian see hieroglyphs 117, 125, 172
engenderment relation, 2, 9, 11, 16–18,
35, 83, 124 language
enunciation, 7–8, 11–13, 17–19, and writing, 9–18, 21–2, 34–5, 45–8,
29n.19, 31, 35–40, 44–8, 52–5, 59n.22&24, 69–71, 79, 84, 88,
58n.13, 61, 67–8, 116, 124–6, 91–111, 114–19
164, 173, 175 defined, 39, 46, 50–1
experience, 4, 8, 10–11, 16–20, 67, 91, langue vs langage, 39, 50–1, 66, 79,
95, 111 89n.1
182
Subject Index 183
langue vs parole, 36–7, 50, 79, 124, semiotics, 33, 42, 65, 76, 87, 104, 125,
172–3 154n.43
relation to society, 34, 38, 48, 83–5, sentence, 7, 64–7, 87, 103, 124, 175
87, 92, 123, 172 sign language, 69, 79
linguistics, 5–9, 15, 31, 33, 37, 44–8, significance, 5, 7–20, 23–4, 26, 46,
50–1, 74–6, 79–80, 121, 125, 51–3, 65–6, 68, 74, 86, 88–9,
173–6 89n.2
lived, the, 67 signification, 7, 16, 18–19, 33, 39,
43–4, 46, 51–2, 82, 84, 87–9, 98,
message, 4–5, 11, 18, 47, 96, 99–100, 110–11, 114, 119, 121–3
103, 107–8, 173 signifier and signified, 7, 12, 14, 44, 53,
money, 75 87–8, 93, 100–1, 105, 117
morphology, 12, 18, 31, 43–4, 65, 104, speech (parole), 10–12, 15, 19, 34, 37,
117, 125–6 44, 47, 50, 79, 84, 86, 91, 94–5,
music, 9, 16, 33, 75, 78, 83–4, 86–8, 105–7, 114, 116–19, 124, 172
110–11 structuralism, 2, 4, 6, 18, 31, 36–8,
43–6, 48, 50, 173
nuntial/noncial, 69, 73n.9 subject, 1, 7, 11, 17–18, 22n.19, 38, 67,
86, 172
objectivisation, 46, 94, 106 Sumerian see cuneiform
otherness, 82, 85 Surrealists, x, 3, 11, 23, 28n.6, 134, 166
syllabary, syllabic writing, 14, 34, 48,
painting, 78, 113, 174 100, 103–5, 112
parole see speech; language syllables, segmentation into, 12, 103–5
phenomenology, 2, 7, 14, 23, 44, 68 syntagmation, 7, 20, 65
phonetics and phonology, 43–4, 65, 81, syntax, 14, 17–18, 65–6, 86, 106
93, 123, 151n.26 system, 6, 8–10, 15–18, 20, 31, 33–6,
pictographic writing, 11, 97–8, 100, 118 40–5, 48–53, 64, 69, 75, 78–88,
pragmatism, 42, 76 92, 95–6, 99–108, 110, 114–15,
117–19, 121–5, 172, 174
reading, 91, 115–16, 118, 170
reality, 4, 10–11, 20, 67–8, 93, 97 thinking
recognising, 15, 86, 103, 106, 110, 115, and signs, 41, 78
119 and speech, 10–11, 20, 34, 91, 93–5,
referent, 12–13, 15–18, 29n.26, 86, 170–1
98–9, 101, 108 and writing, 10–11, 20, 34, 91, 93–5
relay, writing as, 15, 20, 34, 118–19 traffic signals, 33, 69, 75, 82
representation, 10, 16, 20, 34, 86, 91–3, translation, 43, 49–56, 99, 108, 174
95–6, 99–100, 103, 105, 117–18, truth, 5, 16, 68, 121
171
understanding, 13, 15, 119
sandhi, 105 utterance, 7, 38, 40, 44, 53–5, 67, 100,
scribe, 13–14, 112, 114 102, 105–7, 119, 122, 126, 172–4
scriptor, 99–100
semantic, the, 7–8, 11–15, 19–20, 24, verb, 67–8, 173
26, 28n.11, 39, 44, 46, 63–71, 104, voice, 12, 93–4, 110, 116, 118
107, 117, 125–6, 154n.43
semiology, 9, 13, 20–21, 33, 42–3, 49, word, 7, 9–10, 12, 14, 19, 34, 41, 43–4,
64, 69, 75–6, 80–1, 119, 123, 126 48, 65–7, 77–9, 87, 93–4, 102–4,
semiotic, the, 7–8, 10, 13–16, 26, 106–7, 114, 122, 170, 174
28n.11, 29n.19, 39, 41–2, 44–6, writing, 2, 6, 9–20, 34–5, 45–8,
63–6, 68–9, 71, 83, 87–8, 92, 100, 59n.22&24, 62–3, 69–71, 79,
107, 117, 124–5, 154n.43 83–4, 88, 91–119, 121, 124, 170

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Last Lectures:

Edited by Jean-Claude Coquet and Irène Fenoglio

Translated by John E. Joseph

Originally published as Dernières leçons, Collège de France 1968 et 1969,

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by

ISBN 978 1 4744 3990 9 (hardback)

The right of Émile Benveniste to be identified as the author of this work

Preface: Émile Benveniste, a Linguist Who Neither Says

Annex 1: Bio-bibliography of Émile Benveniste 128

Émile Benveniste (1902–1976) was the pre-eminent linguist in

Julia Kristeva, author of many academic books and novels,

Georges Redard (1922–2005), a specialist in the languages of

Tzvetan Todorov (1939–2017), a prominent figure in French

Jean-Claude Coquet is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and

Irène Fenoglio directs the Linguistics section of the Institut des

John E. Joseph is Professor of Applied Linguistics in the

Émile Benveniste, 1902–1976

1913 Arrives in Paris to undertake his studies in the ‘little semi-

1918 Receives baccalaureate degree, with poor results (‘mention

1919 (21 April) His mother, Maria Benveniste, dies in Samokov,

1919–20 Completes the licence ès lettres (first university

1920 Receives the diplôme d’études supérieures for his thesis

1921 (3 May) Granted right of abode in France with legal rights.

1922 Enrols in the École des langues orientales (School of

1922–4 Teaches at the Collège Sévigné in Paris.

1924 (9 October) Becomes a naturalised French citizen. Changes

1924–5 Spends eighteen months in Poona (south-east of

1925 Co-signs three articles in L’Humanité: with Henri

1925 (July) Signs the Manifesto of Intellectuals against the Rif

1926 (May)–1927 (November) Military service as foot soldier

1927–69 Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes

1935 Completes his doctoral theses Origines de la formation

1936 (26 February) Defends his theses on 26 February 1936,

1937 Succeeds Antoine Meillet (1866–1936) in the Chair of

1940–1 Prisoner of war. Escapes, live clandestinely in France

1942 (23 September) His brother Henri is arrested outside his

1956 Becomes Secretary of the Société de linguistique de

1959–70 Secretary of the Société de linguistique de Paris.

1960 Elected Member of the Institute, Académie des Inscriptions

1963 Director of the Institute of Iranian Studies of the Université

1964 Director of the Revue d’études arméniennes (Journal of

1968 (25 August–1 September) President of the International

1969 First President of the newly created International

1976 (3 October) Émile Benveniste dies at Versailles, where he

What makes a great linguist? Great linguists are distinguished

and clarifies all human experiences. Phenomenology, formal

Sylvain Lévi, who introduced him to the great Antoine Meillet

for Semiotic Studies in 1969. On 6 December 1969 he suffered a

So the young man born in the heart of the Ottoman Empire,

is left ‘outside linguistics’:9 either ‘discarded’ because suspected

tion, subjectivity and intersubjectivity. In the wake of analytic

International Semiotics Association,14 this dual conception of

Writing: Centre and Relay

have developed across history. Taking care however to empha-

of events, but the message’s linguistic form. ‘Luck’ befalls

A ‘consubstantial’ relationship between writing and language

­intermediary of translations from Latin into the vernacular

Infinity, and the only way of opposing the absence of limits in

Annex 1: Bio-bibliography of Émile Benveniste 128

intermediary of translations from Latin into the vernacular

propositional, without ‘sound’ or ‘communication’, its ‘inner

of ‘utterance’ the OED gives ‘The action of uttering with the