Derrida’s Allergy to Elaboration: A Saussurean Critique
Late in his career, Jacques Derrida voiced irritation at a question he often encountered in American academic settings: “Could you elaborate?” He described this request as “l’attitude utilitaire, manipulatrice,” a utilitarian and manipulative gesture he associated with U.S. intellectual culture and portrayed as foreign to the European milieu (see link to video below).
This remark is striking for a thinker committed to questioning the assumptions of the entire philosophical tradition. More importantly, it mischaracterizes the nature of communication itself. Derrida implicitly treats elaboration as coercion, as if clarification were an act of domination rather than a basic communicative necessity. A Saussurean perspective shows why this claim cannot stand: without clarification, there is no shared system of signs at all.
The critique that follows takes a firm stance, Derrida’s reluctance to clarify his conceptual lexicon is less a philosophical strategy than a structural impediment to comprehension. If one takes Saussure seriously, his refusal to clarify his conceptual framework is not an act of resistance to metaphysics, it is a breakdown in the very conditions that make communication possible.
The Saussurean Speech Circuit: Why Clarification Is Inevitable
The Shared System (Langue) as Preconditions for Understanding
In the Course in General Linguistics, Saussure explains that communication presupposes a shared system of signs. Meaning emerges only because speaker A and listener B participate in the same langue, a “collective treasure” (trésor collectif) maintained by a linguistic community (Saussure, 2011, p. 13).
For Saussure, the sign is “a two-sided psychological entity” (p. 66), and speech functions only when the signifier–signified configuration in one mind roughly corresponds to that in another. Absent this shared system, the auditory signal is mere noise.
Elaboration as the Mechanism of Alignment
Here lies the key point: explanation is the practical labor through which interlocutors check whether they inhabit the same langue. When someone asks “Could you elaborate?”, they are not imposing clarity; they are verifying alignment between conceptual repertoires.
Saussure emphasizes the tight interdependence of langue and parole: the system is shaped by use, yet no use is intelligible without the system: “Nothing enters the language (la langue) before having been tried out in speech (la parole)” (Saussure, 2013).
Clarification is therefore not a cultural quirk but a structural function of linguistic life. Without such adjustments, communication collapses.
Philosophical Systems as Micro-Langue
The Internal Grammar of Philosophical Traditions
Every philosophical project constructs its own micro-system of distinctions, its own langue. To enter the world of Heidegger, Peirce, or Nietzsche, newcomers must learn the internal logic that organizes terms and values. Concepts are neither free-floating nor self-evident; they derive meaning from their placement within a network.
Conceptual unpacking as the Gate of Entry
Philosophy depends on the same clarifying work that sustains natural language. Glosses, commentaries, definitions, and lectures are the mechanisms by which an intellectual tradition inducts its readers. Far from being manipulative, elaboration is the courtesy that makes a conceptual world inhabitable.
Derrida’s Conceptual Lexicon and the Refusal to Define
Definitions as “Metaphysical Idols”?
Derrida repeatedly warns that stable definitions risk hardening concepts into metaphysical presences. In Of Grammatology he writes that “the signified concept is never present in itself, but marked by the play of difference” (Derrida, 1976, p. 23). This insight matters. Yet it does not eliminate the need for orientation.
From a Saussurean perspective, signs acquire value only through their differential relations within a system. If Derrida refuses to sketch the contours of that system, his readers cannot locate the value of terms such as trace, différance, supplement, or writing.
Predictable Misunderstandings
Predictably, misreadings proliferate. Many take “writing” to mean literal text when Derrida intends the structural possibility of inscription underlying all signification. Others interpret il n’y a pas de hors-texte as a denial of external reality rather than a critique of immediate access. Derrida laments these misunderstandings yet resists the one practice that could mitigate them: clarification.
From a Saussurean standpoint, this amounts to refusing to share the conceptual langue one expects others to use.
The Cultural Binary: Derrida at Odds with His Own Method
The Myth of a French Anti-Elaboration Ethos
Derrida’s claim that analytical expansion is foreign to the French or European intellectual tradition is historically implausible. Husserl’s Logical Investigations rest on meticulous terminological scaffolding. Canguilhem builds entire epistemologies through precise distinctions. Saussure himself is obsessive in defining signifier, signified, value, and arbitrariness.
If elaboration were “utilitarian manipulation,” the French seminar, doctoral supervision, or scholarly treatise would be unthinkable.
Reinstalling the Binary Oppositions He Critiques
The deeper irony is that Derrida mobilizes a binary (subtle Europe vs. pragmatic America) that his own work relentlessly destabilizes. Here, he reinstates the very oppositions he urges readers to unthink. This is not merely inconsistent; it reveals a blind spot.
The allergy to explanation becomes a badge of cultural superiority rather than a philosophical position. In doing so, Derrida replicates the hierarchical structure he elsewhere deconstructs.
Conclusion: Articulation of meaning as the Lifeblood of Intellectual Exchange
Elaboration is not manipulation. It is the indispensable work through which speakers align their conceptual repertoires and sustain the shared langue that makes meaning possible. Saussure’s speech circuit makes this clear: without clarification, there is no comprehension, only parallel monologues.
Derrida’s aversion to explaining his terminology contradicts his stated aims, isolates his readers, and reinscribes the very cultural hierarchies he sought to interrogate. If philosophy is to remain a dialogical enterprise rather than an esoteric performance, explication is not a weakness, it is the condition of possibility of intellectual life.
References
Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press.
Jacques Derrida on American attitude [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2j578jTBCY
Saussure, F. de. (2011). Course in general linguistics (W. Baskin, Trans.). Open Court.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Cours de linguistique générale. Edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, with the collaboration of Albert Riedlinger. Arbre d’Or, Genève, 2005.
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