Jean-Claude Milner


Jean-Claude Milner is a linguist, philosopher and essayist. His specialist fields of endeavour are linguistics and psychoanalysis. In 1971, Milner was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he translated Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax into French. His work helped to establish the terminology of theory of syntax in the French school of generative grammar. Milner is now a professor at the University Paris Diderot and lives in Paris.

Life and work

Milner, who was born in Paris, is the son of a Lithuanian immigrant Jewish father and an Alsatian mother of the Protestant faith.
After studies in a second year preparatory class for the humanities during high school, Milner studied at both École Normale Supérieure and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His education was shaped by the thought and teaching of Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan. Lacan's influence may also be tied to his friendship with Jacques-Alain Miller during these early years. Miller became, subsequently, the son-in-law of Lacan. Both Miller and Milner attended Lacan's seminars held at the ENS and their friendship was instrumental in the founding and direction of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse several years later.
From 1968 to 1971, Milner was affiliated with the Maoist movement of the proletarian Left and discovered the path of his own political evolution. Milner seems to have disavowed, or moved away from, these early affiliations. Alain Badiou, who has remained steadfast in his Maoist affiliations, has engaged in a long-standing contretemps with Milner over these changing affiliations. Milner also received training and education from Roland Barthes and made a close reading of Roman Jakobson.
After his initial association with Chomsky's linguistic theories, Milner's work took a different turn. He published Introduction to a Science of Language which melds a general linguistics theory, that rests on a radical separation between sense and syntax together with an epistemology that combines concepts of Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos. This work tackles a key epistemological problem of the scientific status of Lacan's theories. Milner also follows developments of Chomskyian theory though he does not adhere to the hypothesis of a biological justification for it which Chomsky defended.
Milner's later work, such as the English publication of For the Love of Language, has been called,
Since 2000, particularly in France, Milner has been recognised for his essays concerning anti-Semitism in European history and culture. For several years, he has held a seminar devoted to this theme at the Institut d’études levinassiennes in Paris.
In 2010, Milner became Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Université de Paris VII.

Selected publications

;English
;French

Translations into French