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Why Does a Tiny Strip of Fabric Matter? Saussure, Barthes, and the Language of Fashion

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‘Fashion and literature signify strongly, subtly, with all the complexities of an extreme art, but, if you will, they signify “nothing”, their being is in the signifying, not in what is signified.’ — Roland Barthes, Essais critiques Introduction Imagine two jackets hanging side by side in a shop window. At first glance they seem almost identical. They are made from the same fabric, have the same color, and serve exactly the same practical purpose. Yet one has a slightly narrower lapel, a different button, or a thin strip of piping around the pocket. Suddenly, one jacket looks modern and elegant while the other appears dated. Customers gravitate toward one and ignore the other. But why? Nothing substantial has changed. Neither jacket keeps you warmer. Neither is more durable. No new practical function has been added. The physical differences are almost trivial, yet everyone seems to agree that they matter. Somehow, a tiny modification has acquired social significance. It now com...
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From Writing to Reading: Why AI Makes Critical Thinking More Important Than Ever

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To Chris Thesis The arrival of AI has not made writing obsolete. It has changed what education should value. If drafting becomes inexpensive, then the central academic skill is no longer producing a first draft but critically reading, questioning, revising, and improving one. In this sense, philosophers such as Derrida become suddenly timely, not because students must adopt their conclusions, but because they exemplify habits of reading that the age of AI demands. The Wrong Question Since the arrival of powerful AI systems, schools and universities have found themselves asking a familiar question: Should students be allowed to use artificial intelligence to write essays? Some teachers advocate banning these tools altogether, arguing that they encourage plagiarism, weaken critical thinking, or reproduce the assumptions found in the vast collections of human texts on which they were trained. These concerns are understandable, but they may also be asking the wrong question. Wh...
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Reading Like Derrida: Jakobson, Babel, and the Meaning of "Translation Proper"

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Jakobson's Breakthrough When people think about translation, they usually imagine moving a text from one language into another: an English novel translated into Spanish, or a German philosophical work rendered in French. Roman Jakobson argued that this common understanding is too narrow. Translation, he claimed, is not simply an activity that occurs between languages. It is a fundamental feature of meaning itself. Jakobson's starting point is a simple but powerful insight borrowed from Charles Sanders Peirce: the meaning of a sign is another sign. We understand words not because they somehow contain their meanings, but because they can be interpreted by means of other signs. Meaning is therefore always an act of interpretation. His famous example is the English word cheese . Bertrand Russell had argued that no one can understand the word unless they have had direct, nonlinguistic experience of cheese itself. Jakobson disagrees. Someone who has never encountered cheese can...
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