The Imagination of Reference: Meditating the Linguistic Condition (Humanities Monograph Series)

"A joyful analysis and synthesis of reference as both a creative and a critical act. For Edouard Morot-Sir, to refer is a conscious way of taking possession of, and transforming, life through verbal means. In a first step, he examines the main linguistic quandaries caused by reference. He then reviews ontologically antithetical positions taken by modern realists and idealists and ends up by celebrating reference as a generator of value and energy. The Imagination of Reference is a remarkable summa of a mature critical mind which fuses the literary, philosophical, and linguistic discourse into a meditation that never forgets the reader as a partner."--Raymond Gay-Crosier, University of Florida
In a radical attempt to explore and restructure the presuppositions in any philosophy of language, Morot-Sir examines such current concepts as "natural languages," "linguistic necessity," and "implicite, explicite." Challenging such thinkers as Bergson, Heidegger, Chomsky, and Rorty, he argues that reference is the fundamental act by which signs and referents exist and make sense, and that "any linguistic expression belongs to the experience of reference." As such, he writes, reference is the center of human cultural existence. All value judgments--whether religious, scientific, moral, or artistic--should be conceived of as positive or negative reference. He considers this work the necessary first step for a new form of criticism he proposes to call "reference criticism."
Edouard Morot-Sir is W. R. Kenan, Jr., professor emeritus of French at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the author of many articles and books, including La Pensée négative, Philosophie et mystique, La Métaphysique de Pascal, and Les Mots de Jean-Paul Sartre. He taught logic and philosophy of science at the Universities of Bordeaux and Lille and served for twelve years as the cultural attach to the French embassy in the United States.