Problèmes de linguistique générale, I

Name: Problèmes de linguistique générale, I
Author: Émile Benveniste

Problèmes de linguistique générale, I is a work by Émile Benveniste (1966).

Core claims

Benveniste’s central intervention is not to describe language but to demonstrate that the act of describing language always already presupposes a theory of the subject — making linguistics inescapably a science of subjectivity, not merely of form.
The book dismantles the American distributionalist claim that meaning can be excluded from linguistic analysis by showing that distribution operates on discourse, not on langue, thereby confusing the very Saussurean distinction it claims to honor.
Benveniste’s treatment of the unconscious as structured by a “language” that is infralingustic — deeper than the mechanism education installs — provides the missing bridge between Saussure’s semiology and Freud’s metapsychology, a bridge Lacan would seize but never fully credit.

How does Benveniste’s argument that subjectivity is produced in the act of enunciation complicate Lacan’s claim in the Écrits that the unconscious is structured like a language — and does the infralingustic distinction Benveniste draws undermine or refine Lacan’s position?
In what ways does Benveniste’s insistence on the irreducibility of signification parallel Jung’s defense of the living symbol against reductive interpretation in Symbols of Transformation, and where do the two projects diverge?
How might Benveniste’s concept of linguistic levels and integrative relations illuminate James Hillman’s critique in Re-Visioning Psychology of ego-psychology’s failure to recognize that psyche is structured by its own modes of articulation rather than by a unitary subject?