Binômes, opposition, répétition, contraste

L’article est consacré aux travaux de la spécialiste de lettres classiques Ol′ga Frejdenberg (1890-1955). Persécutée et pratiquement pas publiée de son vivant, elle ne fut pas davantage reconnue après sa mort, en raison de sa collaboration avec Nikolaj Marr au début de sa carrière. Dans les années 1970, le milieu sémiotique russe s’intéressa à elle; on republia ses travaux (une centaine) et on écrivit à son sujet (environ deux cents publications), en différentes langues.La base de sa recherche était l’antiquité, mais son approche était comparatiste et concernait l’Orient ancien, l’Inde, le Moyen Âge européen, l’antiquité la plus tardive. Ses travaux ne se limitaient pas à la littérature, faisaient appel à la philosophie, à l’art, à la religion, à la mythologie. Analysant et conceptualisant un matériau varié et hétérogène, Frejdenberg a créé une théorie originale de la dynamique culturelle, une « sémantologie », théorie de la naissance du sens, qui, par certains aspects, devance certains acquis de la philosophie occidentale et de savants précis, les conceptions de Baxtin, les idées de Jung et de Cassirer, de Lévi‑Strauss, les recherches cognitivistes de George Lakoff. L’article expose de manière succincte un des axes de sa théorie, lié à l’idée de double, de parallélisme et d’oppositions binaires.The article focuses on the main theoretical ideas of Russian classicist Olga Freidenberg (1890‑1955). Few of her works were published during her lifetime due to Stalinist persecutions and defamation, and because of her being associated with Marr, with whom she collaborated at an early stage of her career, her written heritage remained in oblivion until the 1970s. At that point, Russian semioticians took an interest in her and about a hundred of her posthumous works were published in different languages and about two hundred books, papers and dissertations devoted to her ideas and writings were printed.Although the basic material of Freidenberg’s researches was classical, her work was a comparative one and dealt with the ancient Orient, ancient India, the European Middle Ages as well as with primitive cultures. They were not limited to literature, but also dealt with philosophy, art, religion and mythology. By analyzing and conceptualizing diverse and heterogeneous material, Freidenberg has created her own theory of cultural dynamics, creation and development of meaning and interchange of image and concept (‘semantology’). She anticipated in her writings many of the achievements of Western philosophy and specific sciences, Bakhtin’s theories, the ideas of Jung, Cassirer and Levi‑Strauss, the cognitive methods of George Lakoff. The article is an attempt to summarize one of the lines of her theory associated with the concept of duality, opposition, parallelism and binary oppositions