Return to Saussure

SCOTUS. AI image Introduction Recent debates before the United States Supreme Court concerning sex-segregated sports have revived a question that appears, at first glance, almost self-evident: what is a woman? The persistence of this question, however, suggests that the difficulty does not arise from everyday language suddenly failing to function. Speakers of English continue to use the term without hesitation in ordinary contexts. The problem emerges instead when an inherited word from natural language is transferred into a legal system that depends on explicit, operational categories in order to adjudicate rights and obligations. This article approaches the controversy not from a legal or ethical standpoint, but from a linguistic and semiotic one. Drawing on Ferdinand de Saussure’s conception of language as an inherited social institution, together with Roland Barthes’s distinction between first-order and second-order semiotic systems, it argues that the current impasse reflects ...

Introduction Across disciplines such as law, philosophy, and the sciences, definitions play a decisive role. They shape understanding, limit ambiguity, and make shared reasoning possible. This article examines how definitions function in legal texts, how philosophical traditions have questioned stable meaning, and how Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic framework helps clarify what is at stake when language becomes opaque rather than precise. Instead of opposing rigor to complexity, the aim here is to show that conceptual depth does not require obscurity, and that even critical or destabilizing thought depends on some degree of shared linguistic ground. Definitions in Legal Texts: Ensuring Precision and Consistency In legal writing, the inclusion of a dedicated section for “definitions” or “interpretation” serves to clarify and fix the meanings of key terms employed throughout a statute. The primary objective of this practice is to reduce ambiguity and minimize the risk of diver...

Non-Place. AI image   Introduction When Marc Augé introduced the concept of the non-place in the early 1990s, he described a new type of space produced by contemporary modernity: airports, highways, supermarkets, hotel chains. These were environments designed for circulation rather than dwelling, for movement rather than memory. They did not cultivate identity or shared narratives; they coordinated flows. What is often overlooked is how such spaces function at all. Non-places are not empty. They are saturated with instructions, symbols, labels, arrows, logos, pictograms, warnings, and interfaces. They are readable environments. Without this dense layer of visual coding, they would dissolve into confusion. That layer is graphic design. The non-place is therefore not only a spatial phenomenon but also a semiotic one. Graphic design is what allows these spaces to operate. The Non-Place as a Semiotic Environment Augé defines the anthropological place as a space that produces ...

New Media. AI image Introduction When a new technology enters the artistic field, it rarely does so quietly. More often, it unsettles hierarchies, redistributes authority, and provokes fierce resistance from those whose status was secured under older conditions. The current controversies surrounding large language models and generative images belong to this long historical pattern. A dramatic precedent can be found in Charles Baudelaire’s 1859 text Le public moderne et la photographie , where the poet launches a vitriolic attack against the newly emerging medium of photography. Reading this essay today, one is struck not only by the violence of Baudelaire’s language, but also by the familiarity of its argumentative structure. This article argues that contemporary anxieties about artificial intelligence reproduce the same moral and aesthetic logic that informed Baudelaire’s denunciation of photography. Despite the apparent inversion of their complaints (mechanical realism in the nin...