Linguistics
"linguistics" (Fr. linguistique)
While Lacans interest in language can be traced back to the early 1930s, when he analyzed the writings of a psychotic woman in his doctoral dissertation, it is only in the early 1950s that he begins to articulate his views of language in terms derived from a specific linguistic theory,a dn not until 1957 that he begins to engage with linguistics in any detail.
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Lacan's "linguistic turn" was inspired by the anthropological work of Claude Lévi-Strauss who, in the 1940s, had begun to apply the methods of structural linguistics to non-linguistic cultural data (myth, kinship relations, etc.), thus giving brith to "structural anthropology."
In so doing, Lévi-Strauss announced an ambitious programme, in which linguistics would provide a paradigm of scientificity for all the social sciences:
"Structural linguistics will certainly play the same renovating role with respect to the social sciences that nuclear physics, for example, has played for the physical sciences."[1]
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Following the indications of Lévi-Strauss, Lacan turns to linguistics to provide psychoanalytic theory with a conceptual rigour that it previously lacked.
The reason for this lakc of ocnceptual rigour was simply due, Lacan argues, to the fact that structural lingusitics appeared too alte for Freud to make use of it.
however, Lacan argues that when Freud is reread in the light of linguistic theory, a coherent logic is revealed which is not otherwise apparent; indeed, Freud can even be seen to have anticipated certain elements of modenr linguistic theory.[2]
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Lacan's engagement with linguistics revolves almost entirely aorund the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson.
References to the work of other influential linguistics... are almost completely absent from Lacan's work.
There is a corresponding focus on the sign, rhetorical tropes, and phoneme analysis, at the espense of an almost complete neglect of other areas of lingusitics such as syntax, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and language acquisition.
