The Coiners of Language: No. 16 (Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory) - Tapa dura

Reseña del editor

"Is it sheer coincidence that both Gides, uncle and nephew alike - one in the theoretical language of political economy and the other in the language of fiction - are troubled by the same monetary object?"
With this question, Jean-Joseph Goux turns the theoretical concerns of his earliest works, Economie et symbolique and Les iconoclastes, toward the analysis of modern art and culture. In Goux's The Coiners of Language (originally published in French as Les monnayeurs du langage in 1984), Andre Gide's Counterfeiters appears as an exemplary work of literary modernism, using its title metaphor of monetary fraudulence to question the ground upon which value and meaning are based.
"Was it," Goux asks, "purely by chance that the end of realism in the novel and in painting coincided with the end of gold money? Or that the birth of 'abstract' art coincided with the shocking invention of inconvertible monetary signs?" Through close readings of Gide's novel alongside the writings of his uncle, the political economist Charles Gide, Goux reveals some of the historical conditions that later would be called the postmodern rupture.
In the second part of the book, Goux examines the same configuration of symbols in the work of Stephane Mallarme, Paul Valery, Ferdinand de Saussure, and other writers and exposes the instability already beginning to undermine the realism of Hugo and Zola.
Goux points to a symbolism shared by money and language - expressed in the works examined by a coherent interplay of metaphors. Thus, he asserts that these works reflect a historical turning point: a bygone era of "gold-language," the basis for realistic devices of classical representation, has been succeeded by the present age of "token-language," with its vanishing frames of reference and floating signifiers.
Jean-Joseph Goux is one of the major critical and theoretical figures to have emerged from the pioneering Tel Quel group of the late 1960s. His first two books, combined and translated by Jennifer Curtiss Gage as Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud (1990), constituted a highly original and influential reflection on cultural history and theory. With The Coiners of Language, Gage makes Goux's most accessible work available to an English-speaking audience.