This course explores the dynamic relationship between psychoanalysis, structuralist linguistics, and literary theory as they developed within French continental thought. From the outset, thinkers drawn to the formal analysis of signs in linguistics also recognized literature’s experimental power to generate and disrupt meaning. The “French philosophical moment” of the second half of the twentieth century can be seen as one in which philosophy came to identify profoundly with literature, as nearly every major French philosopher of the period engaged extensively with literary texts.

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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 itself might be “structured like a language” yet capable of mobilizing forces that exceed the linguistic altogether.