Saussure without Saussure: Otobiography, Signature and Death

I've been through the desert
On a horse with no name

 

Before the Signature

In 1916, three years after Ferdinand de Saussure’s death, his students published Cours de linguistique générale, the book that would define modern linguistics and structuralism. Yet Saussure never signed the book. What we read as the Course is a reconstruction compiled by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye from student notes of three lecture series delivered in Geneva between 1906 and 1911. In their preface, the editors admit that Saussure “probably would not have allowed” these notes to appear in print and that they assume full responsibility for any distortions or gaps: “We are fully aware of the responsibility we owe not only to our readers but also to Saussure himself, who perhaps might not have authorised the publication of this text. We accept this responsibility, and it is ours alone. Will critics be able to distinguish between Saussure and our interpretation of Saussure?” From the outset, therefore, Saussure—the name, the author, the authority—is already a fiction of mediation, a signature detached from its hand.

This peculiar situation invites a reading through Jacques Derrida’s reflections in Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name (1979). Derrida’s seminar explores how the philosopher’s life, writing, and signature intertwine, and how teaching always entails a transmission of the teacher’s name. The very term otobiography—a deliberate pun joining autos (self) and otos (ear)—already undermines the ideal of a purely self-present autobiography: every writing of life is always addressed to an other who listens, receives, and rearticulates it. If Nietzsche dramatizes this entanglement by signing his own texts, performing his identity as thought, Saussure presents the reverse: a thinker whose doctrine survives only through the ears and pens of others. His case renders visible the “ear of the other” at the heart of all philosophical inheritance.

The Absent Signature

Saussure’s editors transform a series of ephemeral lectures into a lasting monument. The result is a book spoken by a voice that cannot verify itself, a “writing of life as heard by the other.” The editors’ confession that the author might have refused publication marks the first displacement of authority. Saussure’s name adorns the cover, but the gesture of authorship is performed by others. Derrida writes that “every signature already presupposes death,” because it operates by repetition beyond the presence of the signer. The Course literalizes this: its signature belongs to someone who can no longer confirm or deny it.

What we encounter, then, is not an “authored” text but an echo. The Saussure we know is a composite voice formed from notebooks, recollections, and editorial stitching. Yet this constructed nature does not diminish its impact. Rather, it reveals that philosophical discourse—like all writing—depends on mediation, transcription, and repetition. The so-called father of structuralism appears here as a figure produced by structure itself: a network of notes and ears translating speech into print.

The Name and the Institution

In Otobiographies, Derrida shows how Nietzsche’s name became a political and institutional site. After Nietzsche’s collapse, his sister and later interpreters transformed his words into ideological capital; his signature was inherited, contested, and re-signified. The same dynamics govern Saussure’s legacy. The name “Saussure” quickly came to stand for the foundation of structural linguistics, invoked by Lévi-Strauss, Jakobson, Barthes, and others as a guarantee of method and origin.

Yet this proper name is detached from its owner. Derrida notes that “the name functions only by its iterable power, by its ability to be detached from the body that bears it.” In the Course, that detachment is total. The editors’ act of publication converts Saussure’s teaching into a doctrine, transforming the lecturer into a canonical founder. The name survives as a disciplinary emblem. It becomes less the mark of a living subject than an institutional device—something repeated in syllabi, cited in textbooks, installed in the academy.

This institutionalization illustrates Derrida’s “politics of the proper name.” A thinker’s name is never neutral; it mediates authority, inheritance, and exclusion. Just as Nietzsche’s name was mobilized by competing ideologies, “Saussure” organizes an entire scientific field. The irony is that this foundation rests upon a voice we cannot verify. The discipline built on the study of signs begins from an author whose own signature is displaced.

Teaching and the Ear of the Other

If Derrida’s Otobiographies revolves around the “ear,” Saussure’s Course offers a literal embodiment of that metaphor. His students heard the lectures, took notes, compared them, and reconstructed them into a text. The Course exists because someone listened. Derrida defines otobiography as a writing of life addressed to an other who hears, receives, and transmits. Saussure’s students become precisely those ears: mediators who transform sound into script.

The editors’ sense of responsibility—stated in the preface—echoes Derrida’s call for an ethics of reception. To teach, for Derrida, is always to entrust one’s name to others, to expose it to mishearing and reinterpretation. The teachers of linguistics inherit Saussure’s voice in this way: they repeat and transform it. Every classroom reenacts the original act of hearing, as the master’s words are translated once more into new contexts.

Nietzsche, by contrast, made himself his own listener. In Ecce Homo, he writes “Why I am so wise,” “Why I write such good books,” performing the philosopher’s life as self-quotation. His teaching is self-authored. Saussure’s, by contrast, is written entirely from the outside. If Nietzsche is the autobiography of philosophy, Saussure is its pure otobiography—philosophy as it sounds when the teacher is gone.

Life, Death, and Inheritance

Derrida insists that autobiography always involves death because writing survives its author. Saussure’s Course embodies that structure absolutely. It is both memorial and resurrection, a life translated through the ears and hands of others. The text’s continuing authority—its constant citation—shows that survival depends less on authenticity than on repeatability. It enacts what Derrida calls the logic of survivance: a mode of existence in which the name lives on by outliving the living. “The name,” Derrida writes, “is always the name of a dead man.”

To read Saussure through this lens is to see the Course not as a distortion of his thought but as its necessary condition. Language, after all, is the system of differences that allows meaning to persist without presence. The book that bears his name enacts that very principle: it is the sign of a life absent from itself. In that sense, Saussure is a concept rather than a person, a proper name that has become a structure.

The editors’ humble disclaimer—acknowledging their mediation—foreshadows the ethical stance Derrida demands: the inheritor’s responsibility to the name he repeats. Each time we speak of “Saussure,” we participate in that chain of repetition, extending a signature that was never singular to begin with.

Coda

If Nietzsche, in Derrida’s reading, teaches us that the philosopher’s signature is an act of self-exposure, Saussure teaches the inverse lesson: that philosophy may emerge precisely when the signature is missing. The Course in General Linguistics stands as an otobiographical monument—a writing of life as heard, compiled, and endlessly retransmitted. In it, the teacher’s absence becomes the condition of his endurance.

To study Saussure through Derrida is thus to listen for the silence within the name, the resonance of a voice that never signed what it said. The most influential linguistic text of the twentieth century reminds us that teaching is always posthumous, that every author writes, even unknowingly, for the ear of the other.

References

• Bally, Charles, and Albert Sechehaye, eds. Cours de linguistique générale. Lausanne & Paris: Payot, 1916.
• Derrida, Jacques. Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name. In The Ear of the Other, trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Schocken, 1985.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo.
• Godel, Robert. Les sources manuscrites du Cours de linguistique générale de Ferdinand de Saussure. Geneva: Droz, 1957.
• Kamuf, Peggy. Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship. Cornell University Press, 1988.