(BR 26) The Feud of Language: A History of Structuralist Thought

It is an intervention into a debate on the nature of criticism and philosophy in the wake of French theory after 1968. A generation ago, a group of French thinkers audaciously attempted to unify philosophy and human sciences around the notions of structural linguistics. Still successful in the British and American academic world, this project, called poststructuralism, has virtually disappeared from contemporary French intellectual life. As a consequence, poststructuralism nowadays meets either with unconditional devotion or righteous rejection. Judging both attitudes excessive, `The Feud of Language' carefully retraces the birth and development of poststructuralism, examining its intellectual stakes, and criticizing its failures. `The Feud of Language' analyses several crucial texts, ranging from anthropology to poetics, and from phenomenology to epistemology. These texts reveal the tense relationship between poststructuralism and linguistics, a science at the same time highly revered and misunderstood. They show how linguistic notions were ambitiously - and vainly - expected to serve the cause of modernity. Set against the history of the 1960s, poststructuralism appears as a spectacular display of discretionary intellectual behaviour, destined to answer specific French philosophical and political anxieties. Twenty years later, these anxieties look obsolete, as do the linguistic concepts used to allay them.

Text: English, French (translation)