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"[[linguistics]]" ([[Fr]]. ''[[linguistique]]'')
While [[Lacan]]s 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 [[anthropology|anthropological]] work of [[Claude Lévi-Strauss]] who, in the 1940s, had begun to apply the methods of [[structure|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 [[science|scientificity]] for all the social sciences:
<blockquote>"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."<ref>Levi-Strauss. 1945. p.33</ref></blockquote>
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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 [[linguistics|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.<ref>{E}} p.162</ref>
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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 [[linguistics]] such as syntax, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and language acquisition.
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[[Saussure]] was the founder of 'structural lingusitics.'
In contrast to the study of language in the nineteenth century, which had been exclusively ''diachronic'' (i.e. focusing exclusively on the ways that languages change over time), [[Saussure]] argued that linguists should also be ''synchronic'' (i.e. focus on the state of a language at a given point in time).
This led him to deelop his famous distinction between ''langue'' and ''aprole'', and his concept of the [[sign]] as composed of two elements: [[signifier]] and [[signified]].
All these ideas are developed in [[Saussure]]'s most famous work, the ''Course in General Linguistics," which was constructed by his students from notes they had taken at [[Saussure]]'s lectures at the Unviersity of Geneva and published three years after his death.<ref>Saussure. 1916</ref>
[[Jakobson]] further developed the line laid down by [[Saussure]], pioneering the development of phonology, as well as making important contributions to the fields of grammatical semantics, pragmatics and poetics.
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From Saussure, Lacan borrows the concepts of language as a structure, although whereas Saussure had conceived it as a sytem of signs, Lacan conceives it as a system of signifiers.
From Jakobson, Lacan borrows the cocnepts of [[metaphor]] and [[metonymy] as the two axes (synchronic and diachronic) along hwich all lingusitic phenomena are aligne,d using these terms to understand [[Freud]]'s concepts of [[condensation]] and [[displacement]].
Other concepts which [[Lacan]] takes from [[linguistics]] are those of the [[shifter]], and the distinciton ebtwen the [[statement]] and the [[enunciation]].
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In his borrowing of linguistic concepts, [[Lacan]] has been accused of grossly distorting them.
[[lacan]] responds to such criticisms by arguing that he is not doing [[linguistics]] but [[psychoanalysis]], and this requires a certain modification of the concepts borrowed from [[linguistics]].
In the end, [[Lacan]] is not really interested in linguistic theory in itself, but only in the ways it can be used to develop [[psychoanalytic theory]].<ref>Lacan. 1970-1. seminar of 27 january 1971</ref>
It was this that led [[Lacan]] to coin the neologism ''linguistérie'' (from the words ''linguistique'' and ''hystérie'') to refer to his psychoanalytic use of linguistic concepts.<ref>{{S20}} p.20</ref>
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[[Lacan]]'s concept of the [[letter]] is the subject of a critique by [[Jacques Derrida]] (1975) and by two of Derrida's follows (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1973).
[[Lacan]] refers to the latter work in his 1972-3 seminar.<ref>{{S20}} p.62-6.</ref>
==References==
<references/>
=More=
In 1890 the "science of language" had not yet become "general linguistics," the "fundamental science" of the humanities it would become following the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Philologists studied <i>scripta</i> (written traces) and the history of languages but not their origins or that of the original language (<i>Ursprache</i>), a search that was felt to be irrelevant to the science of language, according to the first article of the bylaws of the Société linguistique de Paris, composed in 1866.
Today, however, the situation is reversing itself, and some psychoanalysts consider the near "assimilation" of the mental apparatus to the language apparatus to be a failure (Green, 1984, 1989). Moreover, the number of linguists and semiologists who acknowledge the influence of psychoanalytic theory in the humanities is growing. For example, research on the contiguity between these two fields (Michel Arrivé, Jean-Claude Milner) has been conducted by linguists who have undergone analysis or who are analysts themselves; they have introduced psychoanalytic ideas into research on sign systems, writing, enunciation, modes of text analysis, meaning, and so forth. Links between the fields exist despite the fact that their founders never met. Freud may have seen de Saussure's name quoted by Meringer; de Saussure may have seen Freud's in a report on <i>The Interpretation of Dreams</i> written by one of his colleagues at the University of Geneva (Théodore Flournoy). And although Freud never read de Saussure, it is certain that he heard him referred to as the "father" and author of the <i>Course of General Linguistics</i>. For one of Freud's patients was Raymond de Saussure, the son of Ferdinand, and Freud wrote a preface to Raymond's <i>The Psychoanalytic Method</i> (1922), where his father's book is mentioned.
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{{Encore}} pp. 14-17, 18, 22, 29, 33, 34, 101-2
:* [[Linguistricks]], 15-17, 101
