Language is usually treated as a tool. It communicates intentions, points to things, links ideas, conveys feelings. This understanding dominates both common sense and most theories of communication. Meaning appears self-evident, already in place, quietly waiting inside our sentences to be delivered from one mind to another. We rarely stop to ask what it means for something to “make sense” in the first place.

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Contemporary thought invites us to hesitate. Beneath the smooth exchange of messages, another dynamism is at work - one that does not obey the logic of communication alone. Language does not merely transmit meaning; it produces it, distorts it, delays it, and sometimes lets it slip away.

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This course follows that unstable surplus of language across psychoanalysis, linguistics, and literary theory. Thinkers drawn to the formal study of signs were also fascinated by literature’s experimental power: its ability to bend language against itself, to interrupt sense, fracture meaning, and open new possibilities of thought. Language here is not a neutral medium but a site of risk, invention, and transformation.

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For writers such as Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, and Pierre Klossowski, to think language is to push it toward its limits, into zones where its order can no longer be taken for granted. Their texts do not simply speak about language; they expose it to excess, transgression, and intensity, forcing it to encounter what resists clarity and coherence. Alongside figures such as Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and Gilles Deleuze, they explore language as both structure and adventure - something that organises meaning while also undoing it.

 

In this course, we not only ask what language is, but what language becomes as we speak, listen, read, and write. We will trace its adventures and misadventures as it turns into literature, seeps into everyday expressions, and increasingly operates as a technology, most visibly in the language models that power the contemporary AI moment. Language appears not as a transparent channel of meaning, but as a living field of forces in which sense is constantly made, unmade, and reinvented.