Un livre passionnant, bien qu'ardu. L'auteure survole l'évolution de la linguistique depuis l'antiquité jusqu'à la fin des années 1960, date de la première parution du livre. ( )

Most of us exposed to Julia Kristeva (born 1941) are intrigued by her ability to summarize complex technical theories of psychoanalysis and linguistics – a moving and umbral target – and then incorporate the speaking Body – with its mothering emotions, fathering drives, childhood alterities, and discharge systems – another moving target – to arrive at the “scene” beyond the conscious or even present reality.
She understood at its birth that structural linguistics and phenomenology are quaint archives haunted by necrophiliacs. La Revolution du langage poetique (1974). She invented “semanalysis” to study living bodies scientifically.
In this work, she draws Semiotics from Saussure , and psychoanalysis from Freud's work , to ultimately address the element beyond language. This is a study of studying which questions, uncovers, records, and even denies its own ideological gestures. She describes the process in her Semeiotike (1978).
This book retraces the history of the study of language as it developed in various civilizations, then centers on linguistics as a “science of language”. The author links “linguistic thought” to philosophy, the problems of “meaning”, and to material cultural artifacts.

Part One: Introduction to Linguistics
Part Two: Language in History
Part Three: Language and Languages
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Part One: Introduction to Linguistics

“The conception of language as the ‘key’ to man and to social history and as the means of access to the laws of societal functioning constitutes perhaps one of the most striking characteristics of our era...”.[3]

1. Language, La Langue, Speech, and Discourse

“At whatever moment one looks at language–in the most remote historical periods, among people said to be savage, or in the modern era–it presents itself as an extremely complex system...”.[6] In this chapter she clarifies how the functioning forms of language are used.

2. The Linguistic Sign
The core of la langue resides in the sign.
3. The Materiality of Language

Part Two: Language in History

4. Anthropology and Linguistics: Knowledge of Language in so-called Primitive Societies.
5. The Egyptians: Their Writing
6. Mesopotamian Civilization: Sumerians, Akkadians
7. China: Writing as a Science
8. Indian Linguistics
9. The Phoenician Alphabet

10. Hebrews: The Bible and the Cabala.
Creation is “accompanied by a verbal act” [98] {accomplished by!}. Followed by naming. And including an etymological Why, which Kristeva calls the search for motivation, as in “she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man” Gen 2:23. “And she called his name Moses, because ‘I drew him out of the water’.” Ex 2:10. [98-99].
La langue was conceived as unitary and unifying, as distinguished from languages, “whose plurality is portrayed as a punishment” causing confoundment and scattering. The Tower of Babel story.[99]
The Bible presents language as a spiritual and state-controlled power.[99] God appears to Moses and gives him a miraculous rod to make up for his slow tongue. Exodus 4:10. To seal the covenant between the Chosen and the Lord, Himself wrote with his finger his laws on tablets. Exodus 31:18. God’s word becomes stable, durable, and obligatory – becomes law.[100] Ezekiel eats the scroll of written lamentations. 2:8ff. [101] The real is to conform to the writing, which is a model, the orders, the substitute for God in his absence.
The Cabala profoundly links written language to the divine. Although the letters have no precise signification, the Hebrew alphabet was the object of meditation opening to ecstasy. In the Cabalist Abulafia, The Doors of Justice, the letters and the way they “move” penetrate thinking and imagination, concentrating the unconscious mind. [102] In the 16th and 17th centuries, European linguistic theories were influenced by theology and the underlying Hebrew origins. ( )