Return to Saussure

Letter to a Japanese Friend. AI image Introduction Translation appears, on the surface, to be a practical matter: finding equivalent terms in one language for those in another. Yet for two of the most influential thinkers on language in the twentieth century, Ferdinand de Saussure and Jacques Derrida, this assumption conceals a deeper problem. Both argue, in different ways, that meaning is not a substance that words carry across linguistic borders. Rather, meaning is immanent to the structure of language itself: it arises from the relations among signs and is perpetually unstable. This article brings Saussure and Derrida into conversation to show why translation is always a risky, imperfect endeavor, and why that very imperfection reveals something essential about how language works. Language as a System: Saussure’s Insight In his Cours de linguistique générale (1916), Saussure proposed a radical new way of understanding language. Instead of viewing words as labels for things, h...

René, Robert, Raoul? The Missing Letter In his recent monologue on the Louvre heist, broadcaster Carlos Alcina opened with a classic story: The Arrest of Arsène Lupin by Maurice Leblanc. Aboard an ocean liner, in the middle of a storm, the telegraph operator receives an urgent message: "Travelling aboard: famous thief wanted by the police. First class, blond hair, wound on the right forearm, registered under the false name of…" And then the line goes dead. Only the first letter of the name reaches him: an “R.” This lost initial—a minimal presence, an eloquent absence—sets the entire intrigue in motion. Who among the passengers whose name begins with R is the thief? René, Robert, Raoul? What should have been a simple technical transmission becomes a puzzle. Alcina evokes this scene to introduce his account of the Louvre, another mystery of identities, appearances, and substitutions. Yet the most compelling element is not the theft itself but the force of a truncated p...

Der Wunderblock. AI image Introduction From Plato’s divided line to Freud’s wax pad and Derrida’s subjectile, philosophers and theorists have long turned to tangible metaphors to illuminate the intangible workings of the mind. These physical objects—mundane, utilitarian, even disposable—become instruments through which complex ideas about memory, identity, and subjectivity are made graspable. More than explanatory devices, such metaphors embody the very logic they are meant to describe: layered, impressionable, and haunted by what is not visible. This article explores how Sigmund Freud’s Mystic Writing Pad and Jacques Derrida’s concept of the subjectile both use physical substrates to question the stability of memory and the construction of the self. The Tangible as a Gateway to the Intangible This technique of using physical analogies to explore abstract phenomena has deep roots. In The Republic , Plato introduces the metaphor of the divided line, which separates the world of ap...

La Société du spectacle . AI image Introduction In 1967, the French writer Guy Debord warned that modern life was dissolving into an endless stream of appearances—a world where what mattered was not what we did, but how it looked. In his seminal book La Société du spectacle ( The Society of the Spectacle ), he described a condition in which direct experience is displaced by its image. Debord’s insight, born in the era of television and mass advertising, feels eerily prophetic in the age of social media and artificial intelligence. Today, life often appears less like an unfolding story than a continuous feed—polished, filtered, and measured by its visual impact. Guy Debord and His Theory of the Spectacle Debord emerged from the radical ferment of postwar Europe. As a leading figure in the Situationist International, he fused Marxist analysis with avant-garde art, seeking to expose the mechanisms through which consumer society colonizes everyday life. He argued that capitalism had...

AI image Introduction Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953) proposes a simple yet fertile metaphor for classifying intellectual temperaments. Drawing on a fragment by the Greek poet Archilochus — “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” — Berlin distinguishes between those who, like foxes, pursue many separate ends, and those who, like hedgehogs, interpret everything through a single unifying vision. This distinction, while not absolute or evaluative, sheds light on how certain thinkers transform their fields: by reinterpreting the world through one powerful, generative principle. Among such figures stand two philologists who never met but whose intellectual revolutions still shape modern thought — Friedrich Nietzsche and Ferdinand de Saussure. Each, in his own way, exemplifies the hedgehog’s temperament: Nietzsche through his radical revaluation of all values, and Saussure through his discovery that language is a system of differenc...