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Émile Benveniste | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1902-05-27)27 May 1902 |
| Died | 3 October 1976(1976-10-03) (aged 74) Versailles, France |
Émile Benveniste (French:[emilbɛ̃venist];[1] 27 May 1902 – 3 October 1976) was anOttoman-born Frenchstructurallinguist andsemiotician. He is best known for his work onIndo-European languages and his critical reformulation of the linguisticparadigm established byFerdinand de Saussure.[2]
Émile Benveniste was bornEzra Benveniste inAleppo,Aleppo Vilayet,Ottoman Syria. His father, Mathatias Benveniste, was born into a prominentSephardic family inSmyrna, and his mother, Marianée Malkenson, was anAshkenazi born inVilna. Both parents worked as school inspectors for theAlliance Israélite Universelle. He had an older brother, Henriné Hillel, who was murdered atAuschwitz in 1942, and a younger sister, Carmelia, who died in 1979.[3]
Benveniste's father sent him toParis to undertake rabbinical studies, but he left the Rabbinical School after receiving his baccalauréat, and enrolled in theÉcole pratique des hautes études. There he studied underAntoine Meillet, a former student of Saussure, and Joseph Vendryes, completing his degree in 1920. He gained his teaching qualification in 1922, and taught at theCollège Sévigné in Paris for two years. Benveniste changed his first name to Émile upon naturalization as a French citizen in 1924. He then spent 18 months inPune,British India working as a tutor to children of theTata family. After serving as an infantryman in theRif War from 1926 to 1927 (despite personal opposition to the war), he would return to theÉcole pratique des hautes études in 1927 as a director of studies, and would receive his doctorate there in 1935, with his major thesis on the formation of noun roots, and his secondary thesis on the Avestan infinitive. Following Meillet's death in 1936, he was elected to the Chair of Comparative Grammar in theCollège de France in 1937. He was taken prisoner by theinvading Germans in 1940, and escaped in 1941, spending most of the rest of the war in exile in Switzerland. He held his seat at the Collège de France until his death, but ceased lecturing in December 1969, after suffering astroke that left himaphasic.[4] He also held several high academic positions as a scholar of Iranian and Armenian studies. A few months prior to his 1969 stroke, he was elected as the first President of theInternational Association for Semiotic Studies, and stayed nominally in that position until 1972. Benveniste died in a nursing home inVersailles, aged 74. He is buried in Versailles at theCimetière des Gonards.[3]
At the start of his career, his highly specialised and technical work limited his influence to a small circle of scholars. In the late thirties, he aroused some controversy for challenging the influential Saussurian notion of thesign, that posited abinary distinction between the phonic shape of any given word (signifier) and the idea associated with it (signified). Saussure argued that the relationship between the two was psychological, and purely arbitrary. Benveniste challenged this model in hisNature du signe linguistique.[5]
The publication of his monumental text,Problèmes de linguistique générale orProblems in General Linguistics, would elevate his position to much wider recognition. The two volumes of this work appeared in 1966 and 1974 respectively. The book exhibits not only scientific rigour but also a lucid style accessible to the layman, consisting of various writings culled from a period of more than twenty-five years. In Chapter 5,Animal Communication and Human Language, Benveniste repudiated behaviourist linguistic interpretations by demonstrating that human speech, unlike the so-called languages of bees and other animals, cannot be merely reduced to a stimulus-response system.
The I–you polarity is another important development explored in the text. The third person acts under the conditions of possibility of this polarity between the first and second persons. Narration and description illustrate this.
You, on the other hand, is defined in this way:
A pivotal concept in Benveniste's work is the distinction between theénoncé and theénonciation, which grew out of his study on pronouns. Theénoncé is the statement independent of context, whereas theénonciation is the act of stating as tied to context. In essence, this distinction moved Benveniste to see language itself as a "discursive instance", i.e., fundamentally as discourse. This discourse is, in turn, the actual utilisation, the very enactment, of language.
One of the founders ofstructuralism,Roland Barthes, attended Benveniste's seminars at École Pratique.Pierre Bourdieu was instrumental in publishing Benveniste's other major work,Vocabulaire des Institutions Indo-Européennes in his seriesLe Sens commun at radical publisherLes Éditions de Minuit (1969). The title is misleading: it is not a “vocabulary”, but rather a comprehensive and comparative analysis of key social behaviors and institutions across Germanic,Romance-speaking, Greco-Roman, and Indo-Iranian cultures, using the words (vocables) that denote them as points of entry. It makes use of philology, anthropology, phenomenology and sociology. A number of contemporary philosophers (e.g.Giorgio Agamben,Barbara Cassin,Nicole Loraux,Philippe-Joseph Salazar,François Jullien,Marc Crépon) have often referred to Benveniste'sVocabulaire and are inspired by his methodology and the distinction he draws between meaning (signification) and what is referred to (désignation).Jacques Derrida's famous work on "hospitality, the Other, the enemy"[6] is an explicit "gloss" on Benveniste's ground-breaking study of host/hostility/hospitality in theVocabulary.[7]
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