Jean-Joseph Goux
Les monnayeurs du langage.
Paris: Editions Galilee, 1984. Collection Debats. Author-signed first edition. 2718602546 228 pages.
Softcover volume, with flaps, measures approximately 5.5" x 8.75", and shows very light shelfwear. Binding is sound. Pages are clean and bright.
Inscription on half title page reads "Pour Phil Lewis / ce (illegible word) ou se (illegible word) / monnaie et langage / avec toutes mes amities / Jean Joseph Goux."
""Is it a coincidence that the crisis of romantic and pictorial realism in Europe coincides with the end of gold currency? Is there not a collapse of guarantees and frames of reference, a break between the sign and the something that undoes representation and inaugurates an age of the drift of signifiers? In a first part, the author shows how André Gide's "Les Faux Monnayeurs" is, in this respect, an exemplary work of language and currency, in their closely homological status, are affected but also the value of authorship and all the other values which regulate the exchanges, betraying a fundamental crisis which is also that of the novelistic genre. In the second part, we discover how, thanks to this rupture. historical relationship between "the golden language" of a Zola or a Hugo and "the token language" of Mallarmé, Valéry, Saussure and a few others, it becomes possible to account for the major features of our way of symbolizing."