Romantic Discourse

Abstract

The eighteenth century was a period rich in speculation about language and it is therefore hardly surprising that the inquiries into language inaugurated at that time, more philosophical than philological or morphological, should have awakened renewed interest in our own day, when inquiry into language has been at the centre of an attempt to constitute the human sciences. Two of the most important texts relating to this debate, Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses and Jacques Derrida’s De la Grammatologie have importantly concerned themselves with eighteenth-century linguistic thought. Foucault has described the dissolution of a ‘classical episteme’ located within this period, where the task was ‘to ascribe a name to things, and in that name to name their being’.1 Derrida has taken as his own project a critique of a metaphysics of presence in language, which significantly correlates with Foucault’s formulation and which takes as its centre of inquiry Rousseau’s Essai sur l’origine des langues (1781) and its filiations with the thought of Lévi-Strauss. What I want to show is that each of these thinkers significantly misrepresents the complexity of eighteenth-century thought in order to dramatise or melodramatise a moment of intellectual rupture.KeywordsEighteenth CenturyUniversal GrammarEminent DomainIdeal LanguageRomantic LiteratureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.