Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969

Name: Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969
Author: Émile Benveniste

Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969 is a work by Émile Benveniste (2012).

Core claims

Benveniste’s final lectures reveal that the crisis of general linguistics was not methodological but ontological: the discipline had lost contact with the speaking subject, and his late work attempted to restore subjectivity to the foundations of language theory in a way that parallels depth psychology’s insistence that psyche cannot be reduced to structure.
These lectures demonstrate that Benveniste’s concept of “enunciation” — the act by which language becomes discourse through a subject who says “I” — constitutes a theory of psychic presence that stands as the linguistic counterpart to what Hillman calls personifying: the insistence that subjectivity is irreducible and cannot be dissolved into systems.
The posthumous and fragmentary nature of these lectures, delivered on the threshold of Benveniste’s aphasia, enacts the very problem they theorize: language as a capacity that belongs to a mortal, embodied subject whose relationship to meaning is always already shadowed by loss.

How does Benveniste’s theory of the “empty sign” of the first-person pronoun compare to Hillman’s account of personifying in Re-Visioning Psychology, and what does the convergence suggest about the relationship between linguistic subjectivity and archetypal multiplicity?
In what ways does Benveniste’s principle of interpretance — that language alone can interpret all other sign systems — support or challenge Jung’s privileging of image over word in the alchemical works, as discussed in Hillman’s Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account?
Can Benveniste’s aphasia be read through the lens of Hillman’s The Dream and the Underworld as a descent into the realm where the speaking subject encounters the eidola — the images that persist when discourse fails?