Introduction: From language to writing: the interdisciplinary matrix

Summary

It is generally accepted that there was a significant reorientation in French philosophical thought during the 1950s and 1960s, characterized by a shift of attention from the problem of the subject in history to the analysis of structure and language. Such a development reflected an increasing reaction against the intellectual and doctrinal hegemony of Hegel (or a certain Hegel, in his Kojèvian, Marxist or existentialist mediations), who had been a decisive reference for the historicist and humanist philosophy of the pre- and post-war periods. The philosopher of the new French thought was unquestionably Heidegger, a Heidegger re-read and retrieved from the narrowly existentialist and humanist gloss, while in the ‘sciences humaines’, structuralism was beginning to exercise a parallel and equally powerful influence. Together, and in spite of their evident differences, Heidegger and structuralism can be said to be responsible for the ‘linguistic’ turn in French philosophy during this period. Already in his ‘Letter on Humanism’, published in 1947, Heidegger was distancing himself from Sartre's existential humanism and turning to the study of language, the ‘house of Being’. A few years later, in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1953, Merleau-Ponty suggested that Saussure's theory of the sign might offer to philosophy the possibility of escaping the eternal dichotomy of subject and object. At the same time, Lévi-Strauss was proposing that the linguistic model could be applied to the analysis of myth and kinship structure, while Lacan incorporated Saussurean linguistics into his re-reading of Freud.