On Parole: Legacies of Saussure, Blanchot, and Paulhan
On Parole: Legacies of Saussure, Blanchot, and Paulhan
The inheritance of the German romantic “tradition” of irony by certain 20th-century French texts can become legible in the way such texts repeat the following question: what is the relation between thought and language? This chapter examines how such a question is addressed by Saussure's Course in General Linguistics as well as by texts by Maurice Blanchot and Jean Paulhan. Consideration of etymology as a privileged site for the interaction and potential interference between thought and language also discloses the ineluctably historical dimension of such questions. The etymological pretension to release for thought a “true” meaning obscured over time by language becomes at once a new intervention in the future history of meaning. Paulhan's Alain, Or Proof by Etymology and Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster throw into sharp relief the difference between a historicity that results from ironic disruption and Heidegger's thinking of language and history as aletheia.
Keywords: Saussure, Blanchot, Paulhan, Heidegger, Thought, Language, Etymology, Truth, History, Disruption, Aletheia
Fordham Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .