Saussure’s Laboratory: Learning to Read Modern Thought
1. The Problem Is Not What the Thinker Says At a certain point in the televised debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, the commentator observes that the two thinkers seem to inhabit “different worlds of thought.” Their difficulty is not simply that they disagree. They appear to take concepts from one another’s arguments and immediately place them back into different frameworks, where they acquire different significance. The same words are heard, but they do not necessarily mean the same thing. This suggests a problem that is easy to overlook. We tend to imagine thought as a direct relation between a thinker and what he says. A thinker has an idea, puts it into words, and the words express it. On this picture, understanding what someone says should ultimately mean getting behind the words to the thought that produced them. But what if the relation is not so direct? A speaker does not choose a language from outside language itself. The words available to him, the dis...
