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Work-in-progress papers.
Jordan Skinner (UNIGE): “Toward a General Theory of Negation: Émile Benveniste’s Unfinished Project”
“There is no language without negation”. This is the claim the linguist Émile Benveniste advanced in 1937 at the Collège de France in his course titled “General Theory of Negation”. This claim invites two interpretations. In one reading, Benveniste is making an empirical claim: every language, however ancient or singular, possesses the means of saying “no”. On the other hand, he is making a more fundamental claim about language itself: the capacity for negation belongs to the conditions of language as such. Every language can “say no”, “affirm that something is not”, “deny”, and “reject”. Without that capacity, there would be no language at all. During the Modern and Contemporary Doctoral Workshop, we will unpack this claim together, reconstructing Benveniste’s unfinished “general theory of negation” from the notebooks in which he first formulated it through his later writings on the Native American language Yuchi and on Freud’s 1925 essay “Negation” [“Die Verneinung”]. We will follow Benveniste’s encounters with Hegel, Spinoza, Bergson, Heidegger, and Lacan, asking what happens when a linguist treats negation both as both a grammatical category and a fundamental operation of human thought.
Megan Zeitz (UNIGE), “A Transatlantic Romantic ‘Spirit of the Age?’”
In his 1825 collection of character sketches The Spirit of the Age, the English critic William Hazlitt claimed that his time was “an age of talkers, and not of doers”, because he and his contemporaries were “so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences” that “[they] live[d] in retrospect, and doat[ed] on past achievements”, “lost in wonder, at the height” of their own progress. Despite this seeming belief that the spirit of the Romantic age was retrospective and stagnant, Hazlitt also states that the genius of William Wordsworth’s poetry was animated by “the revolutionary movement of [the] age”. A decade later, on the other side of the Atlantic, the leader of the American Transcendentalist movement Ralph Waldo Emerson made similar claims in his 1836 essay Nature, asserting that his and his contemporaries’ “age [was] retrospective”, focused on writing “biographies, histories, and criticism”, and consequently advocated for the creation of “a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition”, which would induce a “correspondent revolution in things” that would “attend the influx of the spirit” of the “new lands, new men, new thoughts” of the United States of America. Using these apparent similarities as a starting point, the question that will drive Megan Zeitz’s presentation is: might there be a transatlantic spirit of the age expressed in both British Romantic and American Transcendentalist environmental writings? Megan will attempt to provide the beginning of an answer by observing passages from Mary and Percy Shelley’s travelogue History of a Six Week’s Tour (1817), William Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes (1835), Margaret Fuller’s travelogue Summer on the Lakes (1844), and Henry David Thoreau’s memoir-essay-manifesto Walden (1854). Megan’s talk will explore the intertextuality of these texts, the types of aesthetic attunement constructed in them, and what political ideologies might be inferred from them.
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