Roman Jakobson: Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning (1976/1978)

As Lévi-Strauss writes: “These innovatory ideas, towards which I was no doubt drawn by my own thought but as yet with neither the boldness nor the conceptual tools necessary to organize them properly, were all the more convincing in that Jakobson’s exposition of them was performed with that incomparable art which made him the most dazzling teacher and lecturer that I had ever been lucky enough to hear.”

This book is marked by Jakobson’s elegance and demonstrative powers. Jakobson never pursues abstract and sometimes difficult course of his argument without illuminating it by examples from a great variety of languages and from the arts.

Originally published as Six leçons sur le son et le sens by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1976.
Translated by John Mepham
Preface by Claude-Lévi Strauss
Publisher The MIT Press, 1978
ISBN 0262100193
116 pages

Jakobson at Monoskop wiki

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Hans Gumbrecht: Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (2004)

“Production of Presence is a comprehensive version of the thinking of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, one of the most consistently original literary scholars writing today. It offers a personalized account of some of the central theoretical movements in literary studies and in the humanities over the past thirty years, together with an equally personal view of a possible future. Based on this assessment of the past and the future of literary studies and the humanities, the book develops the provocative thesis that, through their exclusive dedication to interpretation, i.e. to the reconstruction and attribution of meaning, the humanities have become incapable of addressing a dimension in all cultural phenomena that is as important as the dimension of meaning. Interpretation alone cannot do justice to the dimension of “presence,” a dimension in which cultural phenomena and cultural events become tangible and have an impact on our senses and our bodies. Production of Presence is a passionate plea for a rethinking and a reshaping of the intellectual practice within the humanities.”

Publisher Stanford University Press, 2004
ISBN 0804749167, 9780804749169
200 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2019-12-7)

Pierre Klossowski: Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1969–) [FR, ES, EN]

“Long recognized as a masterpiece of Nietzsche scholarship, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle is made available here for the first time in English. Taking a structuralist approach to the relation between Nietzsche’s thought and his life, Pierre Klossowski emphasizes the centrality of the notion of Eternal Return (a cyclical notion of time and history) for understanding Nietzsche’s propensities for self-denial, self-refutation, and self-consumption.

Nietzsche’s ideas did not stem from personal pathology, according to Klossowski. Rather, Nietzsche made a pathological use of his best ideas, anchoring them in his own fluctuating bodily and mental conditions. Thus Nietzsche’s belief that questions of truth and morality are at base questions of power and fitness resonates dynamically and intellectually with his alternating lucidity and delirium.”

Publisher Mercure de France, Paris, 1969
Revised edition, 1978
367 pages

English edition
Translated by Daniel W. Smith
Publisher by University of Chicago Press, 1997
ISBN 0226443876, 9780226443874
282 pages

Publisher (EN)

Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux (French, 1969/1978, 5 MB, added on 2015-3-7)
Nietzsche y el circulo vicioso (Spanish, trans. Roxana Páez, 1995)
Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (English, trans. Daniel W. Smith, 1997, 4 MB, updated on 2019-11-22)

See also Geoff Waite’s Nietzsche’s Corps/e (1996).