Return to Saussure

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...

Introduction Across his work, Jacques Derrida returns obsessively to the problem of self-representation, the moment when thought, writing, or image turns back upon itself. In Of Grammatology (1967), he dismantled the metaphysical confidence that meaning or identity could ever be fully present, arguing that every act of expression inscribes the trace of absence. Later, in The Truth in Painting (1978) and Mémoires d’aveugle (1990), he extends this logic to the visual arts, showing that the portrait, especially the self-portrait, exposes the impossibility of seeing oneself without blindness. In Otobiographies (1979), he returns to the written form of self-portraiture — autobiography — to interrogate how a name, a life, and a signature are bound to death and repetition. Across these works, Derrida’s persistent question remains: how does one mark the self without losing it? The painter’s cartouche and the philosopher’s signature both name and bury, leaving traces that survive by det...