Posts

The Point of View Creates the Object: Saussure, Barthes, and the Residue of Linguistics

Image
  « La sémiologie serait dès lors ce travail qui recueille l'impur de la langue, le rebut de la linguistique, la corruption immédiate du message : rien moins que les désirs, les craintes, les mines, les intimidations, les avances, les tendresses, les protestations, les excuses, les agressions, les musiques, dont est faite la langue active. » Roland Barthes, Leçon Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and the déchet of Linguistics Every attempt to understand something begins with a limitation. We decide, consciously or not, where our attention will be directed and what will remain in the background. This is not a defect of thought but one of its conditions of possibility. No science, discipline, or theory can study everything at once. To explain something is also to establish its boundaries. What becomes visible is inseparable from the point of view we adopt. No thinkers understood this problem more clearly than Ferdinand de Saussure. The opening chapters of his Course in Gene...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Forgotten Category: Marxist Critique and the Question of Language

Image
The Problem: When Critical Concepts Become Obvious My first encounter with Marxism was not through the unfinished movement of a thinker searching for concepts, but through an already organized intellectual structure. Like many students introduced to Marxist theory through university courses, I encountered a system divided into three interconnected fields: dialectical materialism, historical materialism, and political economy. The first presented the general laws of development governing nature, society, and thought; the second applied those principles to the historical organization of human societies; the third examined the internal logic of capitalism through concepts such as commodity, value, labour, capital, and surplus value. This organization had a clear pedagogical function. It offered students a map. Complex ideas could be located within a coherent architecture, and a vast body of writing could be approached through a limited number of fundamental principles. Such organizati...
Post a Comment
Read more