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A Guide to Reading Difficult Theory: Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, and the Problem of Meaning

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Introduction Why can a familiar word become difficult when it enters a theoretical framework? A reader encountering Derrida for the first time may understand text as a written document and writing as the production of marks on a page. In Lacan, signifier may initially seem to refer to one component of the linguistic sign, paired with the signified. Barthes's myth , meanwhile, may evoke a traditional story, a legend, or a widely held but false belief. Yet none of these familiar meanings is sufficient to determine what the terms are doing in the theories in which they appear. The difficulty, then, may not lie simply in the complexity of the argument. It may begin earlier, at the level of vocabulary. A theoretical text can take a word that already has a history of uses and place it within a new system of relations. The word remains recognizable, but its conceptual function changes. What makes the experience disorienting is precisely that the reader recognizes the word without y...
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Why Is Language the “Most Important” Sign System? Saussure’s Paradox and the Patronage of the Symbol

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Introduction: The Problem of Linguistic Privilege Saussure's theory of signs contains a tension that would shape much of twentieth-century semiotic thought. In the Course in General Linguistics , he introduces semiology as a general science of signs within which linguistics would constitute only one branch. Language belongs to a larger field that includes writing, symbolic rites, forms of politeness, military signals, and other systems of signification. Yet Saussure also grants language a unique status. Among all these systems, linguistics is not merely one example among others; it is, he writes, "the most important of such systems." This qualification raises a fundamental question: how can language be both one sign system among others and the privileged model through which other signs become intelligible? This tension became increasingly visible in later semiotic theory. Barthes and Hjelmslev moved beyond Saussure's original formulation by suggesting, in diff...
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Unweaving "The Death of the Author": Barthes, Saussure, and the Life of the Code

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Keats famously accused philosophy of "unweaving a rainbow" by exposing the mechanisms hidden beneath its beauty: Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomèd mine— Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade. ( Lamia , Part II, ll. 229–238) Something similar, though in a very different sense, occurs in Barthes's "The Death of the Author." The essay does not destroy authorship; it examines the hidden structures that make authorship appear to be the natural origin of meaning. Yet this text invites a second act of unweaving. If Barthes unweaves the author, we can also unweave the formula itself. What appears at first as a dramatic declaration is reveal...
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