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BENVENISTE, LACAN AND STRUCTURALISM: ABOUT THE OPPOSITE MEANINGS OF PRIMITIVE WORDS

This article intends to make clear some given aspects of Benveniste´s structuralist interpretation about freudian linguistic reasoning, mainly in his text Opposite meanings of primitive words. It is put Benveniste´s text Observations about the language function in freudian discovery, proceeding a dialogue with linguistic hypothesis developed by Freud in his aforementioned text. It is pursued a link between linguistic and psychoanalytic fields, searching Freud´s notion of primitive language and comparing it with Structural Linguistic assumptions supported by Benveniste. The approach is strictly theoric, in order to enlighten the divergences between language reasoning in Freud and Benveniste. In order to achieve this aim, it is searched Freud´s examination about the negation, putting in touch with Benveniste´s examinations about linguist Carl Abel, a strong linguistic influence on Freud´s work, mainly in his text Opposite meanings of primitive words. As a conclusion, it becomes possible to assert that, as being a system and a structure, language has an universal and non-historical quality, which refutes the freudian thesis concerning the existence of primitive languages.

Language; Structure; Unconscious; Negation; Enunciation


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