Presentation by Prof. Szlamowicz: "Semantics and representation: the articulation of discourse"
The conceptualization of reality takes place in language, but it is not done by language, because thought does not pre-exist its production by discourse. This is an important issue when it comes to defining certain social and political claims that are based on a supposedly "performative" conception of language. Discourses on the "imaginary of language", which accuse grammatical structures of conveying gendered thinking, are thus practicing a deterministic simplification that needs to be examined in the light of the processes involved in structuring meaning.
Presentation by Prof. Salvador: "Gender: between archaeology and etymology of writing"
The narrator of Les Filles du feu (Nerval, Angélique, 1854) refers to "old names that have no spelling" as a nostalgic evocation of the intimacy between the speaker and his or her language, which spelling preserves while concealing its depth. Spelling is seen as both the vestige of writing and its mask.
Modernity, from Geoffroy Tory and Megret to Vaugelas, Du Bellay and Robert Estienne, has never ceased to use orthography as an ideological locus for borrowing certain marks of French dignity from antiquity, and thereby signifying its great political vitality.
The question of writing is a lively and intense one for our contemporaries, who often seek answers to the question of origins (inarchè) and truth by observing the symbolic materiality of writing itself. Perhaps they're not entirely wrong... but we still need to prove it. The presentation will therefore address the question of the history of the construction of gender both from the point of view of the history of language and the history of its grammar, i.e. in spoken language and in the construction of the precepts that surround it.
