Saussurean Terontology: The Things that Derrida Didn’t Read in the Course in general linguistics

Abstract

This text is a translation of a chapter from Patrice Maniglier (ed.) Le moment philosophique des années 1960 en France (París, PUF, 2011) by the French philosopher Patrice Maniglier. It considers the reading of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics developed by Jacques Derrida in Of gramatology’s second chapter. The author aims to compare Derrida’s reading with the textual evidence available in Ferdinand de Saussure’s manuscripts found after the publication of Derrida’s book. The hypothesis is that these manuscripts reveal that the theoretical problems that occupy Saussure originate in the comparatist tradition, to which Derrida is unknowingly attached. Thus, structuralism’s main discovery is not related to the differential status of the sign but rather to the characterization of language as an object whose being consists in variation. This means that Saussurean linguistics is not confronted, as Derrida believed, with the issues of identity and difference, but instead with the problem of the one and its relation with the multiple. In order to account for this problem, the Derridean notion of arche-trace is not the best fitted.