What is language? Contemporary thought has shown that this is far from a simple question. Sociological theories that treated language as a vehicle for communication were unsettled by the discovery of the unconscious which, as Jacques Lacan famously put it, is structured like a language. Meaning does not always flow where we expect it to, communication is often hindered, and something other than communication emerges from within language itself.

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This course traces that elusive “something else” through psychoanalysis, linguistics and literary theory. From the very beginning, thinkers drawn to the formal study of signs also recognised the experimental power of literature, its ability not only to produce meaning but to disrupt it, fracture it and create new possibilities of sense. And today, as digital technologies reshape how we write, read and desire, the question of what language is becomes more urgent, more unstable, and more fascinating.

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For figures such as Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, and Pierre Klossowski, to think about language is to draw it into states where it is no longer assured of its own order. Their works do not simply address language as an object of reflection; they made it undergo encounters with excess, transgression, and the extreme, through which language’s structures are unsettled and its functions displaced.

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This encounter between literature and theories of language was further shaped by Sigmund Freud’s discoveries about the unconscious, which were reinterpreted by post-Freudian thinkers such as Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, who revealed how language and psyche co-constitute one another. Alongside philosophers like Roland Barthes and Gilles Deleuze, they explored how language is both a structure and something capable of embarking on a “literary adventure” in which straightforward meaning is obscured or transformed.

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Together, we will trace how philosophy, literature, and psychoanalysis have developed ever more inventive - and often defiant - approaches to language, both methodologically and stylistically. We will ask how structures of signification produce meaning, how literature can become a site of extreme experience that pushes language to its limits, and how the unconscious plays a role in shaping language.