La hiéroglossie japonaise : leçon inaugurale prononcée le jeudi 2 février 2012

Japanese civilisation very early asserted itself in a relationship of “linguistic competition” with Chinese, in the religious, literary and intellectual spheres. This cultural symbiosis articulated on the shaping of the language, which Jean-Noël Robert proposes to call hieroglossia , is the ultimate source of the speech that Yasunari Kawabata delivered at the reception of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968: drawing his sources from poetry Japanese Buddhist, it is part of the Zen tradition and the mysticism of the language of the Shingon school, according to which there is a direct link between linguistic signs and the substance of things.