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Saussure and Baudrillard on Value: Why Saussure Is Already Post-Referential

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The Revolution of Value. AI image Abstract This article revisits Jean Baudrillard’s account of the “structural revolution of value” in Symbolic Exchange and Death through a close reading of Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of linguistic value. Baudrillard presents contemporary culture as marked by the collapse of referential value and the autonomous circulation of signs. While this thesis appears to radicalize Saussure’s distinction between signification and value, Saussure’s own framework already defines value as differential, internal, and independent of reference. By foregrounding the primacy of relational value in Course in General Linguistics , this article argues that Baudrillard’s “death of reference” presupposes a referential grounding that Saussure had already displaced. The comparison clarifies both the limits of Baudrillard’s rupture narrative and the enduring radicality of Saussure’s conception of value. Introduction The concept of value occupies a central place in bot...
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Value Without Reference? Saussure and the Limits of Baudrillard’s Structural Revolution

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The Death of Reference. AI image Objective To critically examine the section “The End of Production. The Structural Revolution of Value” in Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death , showing that: Baudrillard overstates the presence of a referential dimension in Ferdinand de Saussure. He transforms Saussure’s economic analogy into a structural equivalence, ignoring its methodological limits. Saussure’s theory already articulates a system of value that is internal, relational, and non-referential. Introduction In Symbolic Exchange and Death , Jean Baudrillard describes a decisive shift: value, once tied to production and meaning, has become autonomous. What characterizes the present, he argues, is the collapse of reference—“referential value is annihilated”—and the rise of a system in which signs circulate only in relation to one another. This diagnosis is framed as a break with a prior configuration, one that he associates with both political economy and t...
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Value, Difference, and Exchange: Writing Between the Lines of Saussure’s Economic Analogy

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A paradoxical principle. AI image   Introduction: Why Saussure Turns to Economics Among the many examples deployed by Ferdinand de Saussure, few are as frequently cited—and as frequently misunderstood—as his comparison between linguistic value and economic value. The image seems simple: a coin can be exchanged for bread and compared to other coins; likewise, a word relates both to an idea and to other words. Yet this analogy is anything but superficial. It condenses, in a remarkably compact form, Saussure’s entire theory of linguistic value. The difficulty lies precisely in this compression: what was likely unfolded slowly in the classroom appears in the Course in General Linguistics as a dense and rapid conceptual leap. This article aims to slow that movement down. By reconstructing the implicit logic of the analogy, we can clarify a central distinction in Saussure’s thought: that between signification (the relation between signifier and signified) and value (the relation...
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Writing Between the Lines: Reconstructing Saussure’s Concept of Linguistic Value

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A somewhat mysterious process. AI image Introduction: The Problem of the Text In the preface to the Course in General Linguistics , Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye openly acknowledge the difficulty of their task: “Will critics be able to distinguish between Saussure and our interpretation of Saussure? We hope that any blame may be laid at our door, rather than reflect upon the reputation of someone whose memory we cherish.” This remark is not merely editorial caution, it signals a structural feature of the text itself. What we read as Saussure is already mediated, condensed, and reconstructed. This is especially evident in Part II, Chapter IV, §1 (“The language as thought organised in sound”), where a series of foundational concepts—difference, opposition, sign, value—are introduced in rapid succession, often without explicit transitions. The result is a text that is conceptually dense but logically elliptical. The aim of this article is to reconstruct the implicit logic o...
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What Is a “1”? Grading, Interpretation, and the Ethics of Decision

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The Teacher. AI image   “I’ll give €1000 to anyone who can tell me what a ‘1’ is.” A colleague once made this remark during a teacher training seminar. The context was telling: more than twenty experienced teachers were asked to assess the same student essay using a shared rubric. Despite comparable professional backgrounds and clearly defined criteria, the results varied significantly. Some assigned the top mark, others a “3,” with several gradations in between. Such divergence is often treated as a practical inconvenience, something to be minimized through clearer guidelines or tighter standardization. Yet its persistence suggests a deeper issue. If a grade were a stable property of the text, one would expect far greater agreement. At the same time, few educators would accept that grading is simply arbitrary. This tension points to a more fundamental question: what kind of act is grading? The following argument proposes that marks are not discovered but produced through acts ...
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