Since its publication in 1969, Émile Benveniste's Vocabulaire--here with
a new introduction by Giorgio Agamben--has been the classic reference
for tracing the institutional and conceptual genealogy of the
sociocultural worlds of gifts, contracts, sacrifice, hospitality,
authority, freedom, ancient economy, and kinship. A comprehensive and
comparative history of words with analyses of their underlying neglected
genealogies and structures of signification--and this via a masterful
journey through Germanic, Romance, Indo-Iranian, Latin, and Greek
languages--Benveniste's dictionary is a must-read for anthropologists,
linguists, literary theorists, classicists, and philosophers alike.
This book has famously inspired a wealth of thinkers, including Roland
Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Umberto
Eco, Giorgio Agamben, François Jullien, and many others. In this new
volume, Benveniste's masterpiece on the study of language and society
finds new life for a new generation of scholars. As political fictions
continue to separate and reify differences between European, Middle
Eastern, and South Asian societies, Benveniste reminds us just how
historically deep their interconnections are and that understanding the
way our institutions are evoked through the words that describe them is
more necessary than ever.
