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Is “Sign” a Trans-Historical Concept? Derrida, Saussure, and the Limits of Genealogy

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Car la signification « signe » a toujours été comprise et déterminée, dans son sens, comme signe-dé, signifiant renvoyant à un signifié , signifiant différent de son signifié . (bold added), Derrida, 1966. Introduction:  The Risk of Conceptual Continuity in Derrida’s Reading of Saussure In Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences , Derrida advances a far-reaching thesis: the concept of “sign” has always functioned within a structure of referral—“sign-of, signifier referring to a signified, signifier different from its signified” (Jacques Derrida, 1978, p. 281). On this basis, he aligns figures as distant as Aristotle, Augustine of Hippo, and Ferdinand de Saussure within a shared configuration governed by what he names the metaphysics of presence. The claim is not merely historical; it concerns an underlying structural logic that allegedly persists beneath theoretical transformations. Yet this gesture raises a methodological difficulty. Saussure’s ...
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After the Center: On Derrida’s Two Interpretations of Interpretation

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Structure, Sign, and Play. AI image     “There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of the sign, and of play. One seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin that escapes play and the order of the sign, and lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and attempts to move beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of onto-theology—that is to say, throughout the whole of its history—has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play ”. Introduction: When the Center No Longer Holds What becomes of interpretation once thought can no longer rely on an origin? When the reassuring stability of a center begins to waver, interpretation ceases to be a secondary gesture applied to already constituted meaning; it becomes the very space in which meaning emerges...
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The Just Word: Clarity as a Sign of Understanding

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The Birth of Intelligibility. AI image The Suspicion Toward Clarity When an idea resists clear expression, the obstacle is not always its depth;  often it signals that thought has not yet reached its final stage.   Intellectual culture has long harbored a quiet suspicion toward clarity, as though lucidity diminished seriousness. Dense prose is often mistaken for rigor, while transparent language risks being read as naïve. Yet this opposition is misleading. Difficulty and profundity are not synonyms, and obscurity is no guarantee of insight. We may therefore begin with a simple question: is darkness the mark of thought at its limits, or does it occasionally signal that thinking has not yet reached its mature form? Clarity as the Result of Discipline Clarity is rarely immediate. It is the visible outcome of a long discipline. What appears effortless on the page typically conceals years of hesitation, revision, and conceptual reordering. To render something intelligible w...
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