Madness, Language, Literature by Michel Foucault;Henri-Paul Fruchaud;Daniele Lorenzini;Judith Revel;

Author:Michel Foucault;Henri-Paul Fruchaud;Daniele Lorenzini;Judith Revel; [Foucault, Michel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI000000 PHILOSOPHY / General, PHI029000 PHILOSOPHY / Movements / Structuralism, LIT024050 LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2023-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

10

[The Extralinguistic and Literature]

BnF, Fonds Foucault, NAF 28730, box 54, folder 4. Foucault didn’t provide a title for this text.

For at least thirty years, literature has been analyzed as an internal form of the general forms of language, associated, more or less directly, with linguistics.

Yet, by an inverse movement that has grown more noticeable over the past ten years, the importance of the extralinguistic is becoming increasingly apparent.

This eruption of the extralinguistic is closely tied to the difficulties encountered in analyzing meaning; but it cannot be reduced to those difficulties and, most importantly, is not based on them.

The problem has been stated incorrectly. The debate is often presented in terms of signifier and signified.

Harris attempted to entirely avoid meaning in defining signifying elements (and those who, in researching nonlinguistic material—posters, and so on—fail to find criteria for defining signifying elements, have placed their hopes in Harris).1

To which one replies that the dimension of the signified cannot be forgotten, and the criterion of permutation (introduced by the most formalist representatives of structuralism) assumes a reference to the signified.

On the other hand, the difficulty in analyzing the signified in terms of structures, the difficulty in organizing a semantic field, also leads to the search for a model for the signifier rather than seeking to avoid the parallelism.

But that may not be the real problem. For a while now, what language analysis has taught us is the intrinsic importance of the extralinguistic:

—Either within linguistics itself —through the analysis of motivations in Jakobson

—by reference to explicit discourse in Chomsky

—by the analysis of sense-signified relationships in Prieto

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