"The language of Baudelaire", a culturology

Abstract

This text is an attempt to approach Emile Benveniste’s notes about poetic language from the point of view of a “culturology” (a science which he called for in a 1968 interview), showing the continuity between this unpublished research and his other works on languages and language in general. Indeed, “Baudelaire’s language” is for Benveniste, first of all, to be described as a “new and specific cosmos”. As a linguist, he asks how to describe this language, pointing out the incapacity of the linguistics of his time to approach poetic language, to determine its originality. For Benveniste, this discovery of Baudelaire implies a criticism of a linguistics based on the concept of sign, and a “conversion of one’s point of view”. This text attempts to show the full scope of these notes on Baudelaire.