The Wooden Form of Meaning: Saussure and Derrida on Identity and Value

The cobbler’s mold. AI image

 

From Saussure to Derrida — Unseen Structures of Meaning

Both Ferdinand de Saussure and Jacques Derrida challenged the notion that meaning or identity arises from within the sign or subject itself. For Saussure, linguistic value does not stem from an intrinsic connection between sound and concept but from a network of differences within a system. Derrida extends this insight, showing that identity—whether linguistic, artistic, or subjective—is never self-present but depends on prior traces and frames.

This essay proposes that Derrida’s forme en bois (wooden form), introduced in his reading of Van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes, operates as a tangible metaphor for these pre-existing structures. Just as the shoe cast gives shape to the absent foot, so too do unseen frameworks—linguistic, cultural, or material—shape meaning and identity. The forme stands where the subject is not; it is the condition of presence through absence.

Van Gogh’s Shoes: The Threshold of Identity

In The Truth in Painting, Derrida revisits Martin Heidegger’s famous essay on Van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes. Where Heidegger found in the worn boots the essence of peasant being, Derrida detects an interpretive projection. The painting, he argues, reveals not a truth about the peasant’s world but the instability of that very attribution. The question “whose shoes?”—Heidegger’s or Van Gogh’s?—already dislocates the supposed unity of presence.

Derrida’s analysis unfolds through the concept of the parergon, the frame or supplement that both belongs and does not belong to the work. The frame is neither inside nor outside, yet it structures how the artwork is perceived. In this undecidable position, it mirrors the condition of identity itself—never fully contained, always dependent on what lies beyond.

Amid this reading, Derrida introduces the cobbler’s mold used to shape shoes before they receive their wearer. The mold is an absent presence: “an empty support, a hollow form which gives form to the thing, while remaining foreign to it” (La Vérité en peinture, 1978). The forme holds the place of the foot without ever being the foot. In doing so, it materializes a paradox—the support that enables appearance is also what effaces itself in the final product.

The forme en bois thus stands as an emblem of Derrida’s broader meditation on identity. Presence is never pure but structured by what precedes and exceeds it. The support structure, once removed, leaves no trace of itself except in the shape it has given. Likewise, identity is always the after-effect of frames—linguistic, cultural, or metaphysical—that remain unseen yet indispensable.

Pre-existing Structures in Derrida

The forme en bois points toward Derrida’s central insight: that every act of meaning or identity presupposes an infrastructure that precedes it. These structures operate on several interconnected levels—linguistic, social, metaphysical, and material.

At the most immediate level, there is the linguistic structure. Before any subject can speak, the system of signs and differences that makes speech possible already exists. The “I” that pronounces itself relies on the prior organization of language—the grammar, oppositions, and categories that give it sense. In this sense, identity is not a natural essence but a linguistic effect: it is shaped by a structure that precedes the speaker.

Interwoven with language are the social and cultural structures that shape subjectivity long before self-awareness arises. Social roles, gender norms, institutional frameworks, and historical narratives all function as a prosthetic matrix into which the individual is fitted. The self is not born into a void but into a ready-made shell whose contours it inherits and inhabits.

Beneath both of these layers lies a metaphysical structure: the long tradition of Western thought that privileges origin, presence, and the self-identical subject. Derrida’s deconstruction exposes how this framework, too, operates as a hidden support. The metaphysical “center”—whether God, reason, or the cogito—is not self-grounding but dependent on traces and differences that undo its stability. Like the carved wooden shape, metaphysics shapes what appears only by effacing its own visibility.

Finally, Derrida never loses sight of the material and technological dimension of structure. His fascination with tools and supports—the shoe form, the subjectile, the mystic writing pad—underscores that identity is always mediated by technical forms. Writing, prosthesis, and inscription are not external to thought but constitute its very condition. There is no pure subject, only a subject sustained by material supports.

Across these strata—linguistic, social, metaphysical, and material—the same paradox recurs: what gives shape to meaning and identity disappears in the act of giving form.

Saussure’s Value and La Langue

Saussure’s linguistic theory anticipates this structural insight, though from a different vantage point. In the Course in General Linguistics, he distinguishes la langue, the underlying system that renders language intelligible, from la parole, individual acts of speech. Meaning, or “value,” arises not from intrinsic content but from relational difference: “In language there are only differences, and no positive terms” (Saussure 1916, p. 120).

Like Derrida’s forme en bois, la langue is both necessary and invisible. It underlies every utterance but never appears directly. The speaker, believing to express personal intention, merely activates a system that pre-exists them. Saussure’s insight that the linguistic sign is arbitrary further undermines any idea of a natural correspondence between word and thing. Meaning is thus a product of position within a differential network, not of essence.

This structural dependency resonates with Derrida’s notion of the shoe tree. Just as the matrix determines the shoe’s contour without ever being visible, la langue shapes expression while remaining in the background. Both thinkers reveal that what seems most personal—speech or identity—is in fact molded by a prior system of relations.

Resonances: From Value to Trace

Saussure’s value and Derrida’s identity converge in their refusal of origins. For Saussure, there is no original meaning to recover—only differences that define one another. For Derrida, there is no self-identical subject or pure presence; there is only the play of traces, each marking an absence.

Where Saussure confined his inquiry to the structural functioning of language, Derrida expands the paradigm to ontology itself. The forme en bois becomes the figure of this expansion: a material support that, by disappearing, inaugurates presence. It dramatizes the paradox of structure—the necessity of what must vanish for identity to appear whole.

Derrida’s cobbler’s mold is not merely a metaphor for structure but a performative figure of its instability—a support that at once enables and erases what it supports. This self-effacing function parallels how la langue disappears behind la parole.

Both thinkers thus invite us to see meaning and identity not as substances but as effects of systems that precede them. The unseen molds—the langue, the forme—constitute the very ground of intelligibility. In this light, Derrida’s imprint of absence and Saussure’s linguistic structure are not opposites but homologous gestures: each exposes the invisible architecture of what appears given.

Conclusion: The Ontology of Invisible Resonance

Beneath the linguistic sign and beneath the subject alike, both Saussure and Derrida discern a field of prior relations—a resonance that precedes articulation. This resonance is not simply structural but ontological: it is the vibration of difference through which meaning and identity come to presence. The forme en bois and la langue are performative figures for this same invisible rhythm, the silent architecture that sustains every utterance and every self. What we call “language” or “identity” is only its echo, the contour left by what has already withdrawn.

References

• Derrida, Jacques. La Vérité en peinture. Paris: Flammarion, 1978.
• Derrida, Jacques. De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit, 1967.
• Heidegger, Martin. “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes.” In Holzwege. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1950.
• Saussure, Ferdinand de. Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot, 1916.