Difference and Opposition in Saussure: Understanding the Architecture of the Linguistic Sign
For example, in Read My Desire, Joan Copjec, drawing on Samuel Weber’s essay “Closure and Exclusion,” argues that Saussure’s dictum—« Dans la langue, il n’y a que des differences »—ensnares his linguistics in a version of Zeno’s paradox. If each signifier derives its value only from another signifier, and that from another in turn, meaning seems condemned to indefinite deferral. Confronted with this abyss, Saussure allegedly retreats. He abandons a radical conception of pure “difference” and replaces it with determinate “oppositions”, isolating a synchronic moment to arrest what would otherwise be an infinite regress (see quote below).
The accusation is rhetorically powerful, yet this reading misconstrues the nature of the shift. Saussure’s change in terminology does not signal hesitation or conceptual retreat. It marks a transition from one analytical level to another within his theoretical framework. “Difference” and “opposition” are not rival solutions to a crisis; they designate distinct but complementary dimensions of the same structural account.
When Saussure states that in language (la langue) “there are only differences,” he is considering the signifier and the signified separately. This separation is abstract, methodological, not ontological. In the linguistic sign the two are inseparable—like the two sides of a sheet of paper: one cannot be cut without affecting the other. They never exist as autonomous entities within langue; they can be distinguished only for purposes of analysis.
At that abstract level there are no positive terms, no pre-existing ideas, no substantial sounds—only differences without positive terms. “Difference” here means that each element is what it is solely by not being the others. A signifier has no identity grounded in intrinsic substance, but only through its distinction from other signifiers; the same holds for concepts. It is crucial to emphasize that these elements, taken in isolation, are not yet signs.
The decisive turn comes when Saussure qualifies his earlier claim: to say that everything in language is negative is true only if signifier and signified are considered separately. Once we consider the sign “in its totality,” we are confronted with something positive in its own order. The sign—the association of a signifier with a signified—is a positive fact. Yet its positivity does not lie in substance; it lies in an instituted correlation between two orders of differences. It is a relational fact stabilized by the linguistic institution —that is, by the system (la langue) sustained within the speaking community.
Here the terminological distinction becomes clear. “Difference” designates the constitutive negativity within a single order—among signifiers as such or among concepts as such. “Opposition,” by contrast, characterizes the relation between complete units: that is, between already constituted signs, each comprising a signifier and a signified. Hence Saussure’s insistence that when signs are compared—“positive terms”—one should no longer speak of difference; between them there is only opposition. The word “difference” would be inaccurate in this context, since the comparison no longer concerns acoustic images among themselves or ideas among themselves, but total signifying units.
This shift does not abolish difference; it presupposes it. Opposition between signs is possible only because, at each level, differential relations already operate. What changes is the structural plane: from the abstract field of pure differentials to the articulated system of signs. Opposition organizes prior negativity into functional units.
Nor is this distinction confined to §4. Throughout the Course, Saussure consistently employs “opposition” when dealing with constituted units or with functional relations within the system. In his discussion of grammatical facts, he remarks that every such fact ultimately expresses an opposition of terms. The well-known example Nacht : Nächte illustrates not a mere phonetic variation, but the confrontation of complex terms, each defined by an entire network of internal relations. Language, he observes, is “an algebra that has only complex terms.” Likewise, in his account of discourse, the selection of a form such as que vous taisiez is determined by its opposition to related forms such as que tu te taises, que nous nous taisions, or taisez-vous, within the same associative series.
Its value arises from a latent system of syntagmatic and associative (paradigmatic) relations. The sign does not signify by virtue of an inner property, but through the structured interplay that situates it among alternatives. Should the contrasting forms disappear, its value would immediately be altered.
To grasp this interrelation fully, one must recall that the signified is not merely the counterpart of a particular signifier; it is defined by the coexistence of other terms within the same state of language. A sign does not signify through interior content but through its position within a network of oppositions:
The paradox—in Baconian terms, the trap in the cave—is this: the meaning, which appears to us to be the counterpart of the auditory image, is just as much the counterpart of terms coexisting in the language. — Constantin's Notebook X 135a
Linguistic value emerges from that structured interplay. Saussure illustrates this web of relations in the following diagram consisting of a series of slots:
The central point may be stated succinctly: “difference” names the internal negativity of each order—phonic and conceptual; “opposition” names the structural confrontation between complete signs within a given state of langue; value arises from the system of “oppositions”; and the positivity of the sign is institutional rather than substantial. “Opposition” does not cancel “difference”. It presupposes it and organizes it into operative units within the linguistic system.
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Achilles and the Tortoise
That Zeno's paradoxes are still relevant to any semiotically based theory of the subject is demonstrated in an important essay by Samuel Weber entitled "Closure and Exclusion. " Here Weber explores how an acceptance of the Saussurian dictum, "in language there are no positive terms, only differences," forces us to confront the specter of Zeno and the problem of infinite regress. For, once one breaks up the signifying chain, the statement, into a series of minimal units, of diacritical terms or signifiers that take their meaning only from their reference to another signifier, which in turn refers to another, and so on and on, and once this endless deferral is no longer considered to be grounded in some external reality (language being conceived as autonomous, as self-sustaining) , we are obliged to wonder how it is possible to produce any statement at all. It would seem that this deferral would suspend meaning indefinitely. Intimidated by this problem of infinite and therefore de-determining regress, Saussure eventually retreated from his original path breaking notion of pure difference and replaced it with a notion of determinate oppositions by isolating a moment within this process of deferral. That is, Saussure temporarily limited the differential play of signification to the moment of understanding, when the open-ended diachrony of the system was bracketed and a synchronic closure was supposed to be operative. The signifier, then, no longer awaited a future signifier that would give it meaning but received its value from a signifier with which it was co-present. Past and future, temporality and change dropped out of the system of signifiers that now were assumed to determine each other mutually, simultaneously (emphasis added). Read My Desire, Joan Copjec
Bibliography
Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Translated by Wade Baskin. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011 [1916].
Saussure, F. (1910-1911). Troisième cours de linguistique générale: d'après les cahiers d'Emile Constantin [Saussure's Third Course of Lectures on General Linguistics: From the Notebooks of Emile Constantin]. (R. Harris, Trans.) University of Oxford.1993
Weber, Samuel. “Closure and Exclusion.” In Institution and Interpretation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
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