Return to Saussure

Car la signification « signe » a toujours été comprise et déterminée, dans son sens, comme signe-dé, signifiant renvoyant à un signifié , signifiant différent de son signifié . (bold added), Derrida, 1966. Introduction:  The Risk of Conceptual Continuity in Derrida’s Reading of Saussure In Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences , Derrida advances a far-reaching thesis: the concept of “sign” has always functioned within a structure of referral—“sign-of, signifier referring to a signified, signifier different from its signified” (Jacques Derrida, 1978, p. 281). On this basis, he aligns figures as distant as Aristotle, Augustine of Hippo, and Ferdinand de Saussure within a shared configuration governed by what he names the metaphysics of presence. The claim is not merely historical; it concerns an underlying structural logic that allegedly persists beneath theoretical transformations. Yet this gesture raises a methodological difficulty. Saussure’s ...

Introduction: Why Port-Royal Keeps Returning Port-Royal has an uncanny persistence in modern debates on language, knowledge, and human nature. A seventeenth-century grammatical and philosophical project, rooted in a specific historical moment, it nevertheless reappears in contexts that seem to pull it in opposite directions. Ferdinand de Saussure treats it as a distant methodological precursor, Michel Foucault situates it within a historically bounded episteme, and Noam Chomsky invokes it as an early articulation of an innate structure of mind. At first glance, this recurrence invites a familiar question: which interpretation is correct? Yet this question already assumes that Port-Royal carries a stable meaning awaiting discovery. What if the persistence of Port-Royal tells us something else, namely, that meaning does not reside in sources themselves, but emerges from the systems that mobilize them? This article argues that Port-Royal functions as a revealing case study for a bro...