Return to Saussure

Introduction: A Legal and Philosophical Paradox Can a false report be  faithful ? At first glance, the question appears self-contradictory. If a newspaper publishes inaccurate information, common sense suggests that the report cannot be true. Yet democratic legal systems have long recognized a distinction between factual error and irresponsible reporting. Under certain circumstances, journalists may receive legal protection even when parts of their reporting later prove incorrect. This distinction rests on a broader insight about the nature of knowledge itself. Reporters rarely observe every event they describe firsthand. Instead, they reconstruct what happened from documents, photographs, testimony, official records, and other forms of evidence. The challenge is not simply to discover the truth but to investigate it under conditions of uncertainty. More than a century before contemporary debates about media responsibility, Charles Sanders Peirce developed a theory of inqui...

"Ceci est l’histoire d’un crime — du meurtre de la réalité. Et de l’extermination d’une illusion — l’illusion vitale, l’illusion radicale du monde. Le réel ne disparaît pas dans l’illusion, c’est l’illusion qui disparaît dans la réalité intégrale". J. Baudrillard The Silence After the Act Reality has already been murdered. No one witnessed it. There was no noise, no rupture, nothing that could be clearly identified as an event. No body, no weapon, no scene to secure. And yet something has shifted. The world moves too smoothly, responds too quickly, reflects us too perfectly. Resistance has thinned out. Even what appears to stand apart is already integrated. This is not progress. It is the silence that follows an act carried out without error. We tend to imagine catastrophe as something visible—collapse, explosion, breakdown. But the decisive break may not announce itself at all. It may take the form of an erasure so complete that nothing remains to mark it. Jean Ba...

Introduction: Where Does Creativity Come From? In 1971, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault took part in a public debate at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. Moderated by the philosopher Fons Elders, the discussion focused on fundamental philosophical questions: how should creativity and truth be explained? Are they grounded in the capacities of individual subjects, or do they emerge from historically specific systems that precede and shape those subjects? These questions are not only at the heart of the debate itself, but also central to Foucault’s inaugural lecture, The Order of Discourse . Read together, these texts reveal two opposing strategies for accounting for novelty: Chomsky’s restoration of the speaking subject and Foucault’s displacement of the knowing subject in favor of what may be called a " grid of intelligibility. " Chomsky: Creativity and the Speaking Subject Chomsky’s intervention in linguistics responds to a specific theore...

Traces. AI art Introduction In his Poetics , Aristotle offered one of the most cited definitions of metaphor: it consists, he writes, in “giving the thing a name that belongs to something else” (Poetics 1457b6–9). Jacques Derrida recalls this formula in Margins of Philosophy (p. 231), where it becomes the point of departure for a wide-ranging deconstruction of the philosophical dream of literal language. If metaphor is alien naming, then its opposite must be authentic naming: a speech where every entity possesses its own proper designation. This apparent alternative, Derrida argues, is precisely what metaphysicians have pursued—the fantasy of a discourse purified of figurative intrusion. Yet the very idea of such purity is internally compromised, since it is framed through metaphors of ownership, propriety, and transfer. Aristotle’s Definition and Its Implications Aristotle’s wording situates metaphor as a form of displacement: a name is carried across from its rightful home to...

I care about reality. AI art Introduction In a clip titled I Don’t Care About Jordan Peterson’s Metaphorical Truth , Matt Dillahunty, former host of The Atheist Experience , delivers a candid reflection on his encounter with Jordan Peterson. At one point, Dillahunty declares: “I don't care about metaphorical truths at all. I care about reality.” What seems like a straightforward appeal to common sense is, on closer inspection, laden with philosophical assumptions. Dillahunty’s statement not only distances him from Peterson’s symbolic interpretations of religion, but also inadvertently invites scrutiny from thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, and Jacques Derrida. Their theories of language and meaning challenge the sharp divide Dillahunty posits between metaphor and reality, and reveal the fragility of this opposition. Metaphorical Truth and Its Discontents Jordan Peterson has often suggested that biblical narratives, while not literally f...

  Introduction: The Voice of the Soul and the Body The history of Western metaphysics is structured by oppositions: interior and exterior, nature and artifice, presence and absence. Nowhere is this clearer than in the traditional opposition between good and bad writing. In Of Grammatology , Derrida calls attention to this inherited dichotomy. What is named "good writing"—the divine inscription in the heart—is not writing in the literal sense at all, but a metaphor for the logos, the supposed origin of truth and meaning. In contrast, "bad writing" is associated with exteriority, technique, and mediation—the very things that Western thought has long held suspect. The distinction parallels the idea of a "voice of the soul," pure and internal, as opposed to a "voice of the body," passionate and external. This opposition has governed conceptions of meaning, language, and truth for centuries. But Derrida does not merely invert this hierarchy; he expo...

Introduction In his essay On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense , Friedrich Nietzsche delivers a radical challenge to our understanding of truth, knowledge, and language. He provocatively asks: What is a word? What, then, is truth? These questions form the core of his critique, suggesting that truth is a human invention, shaped by language and metaphor. For Nietzsche, words are not neutral tools that reflect reality but distortions—metaphors we’ve created to make sense of a complex world. This unsettling idea forces us to confront how much of what we consider "true" is nothing more than a linguistic convention, deeply embedded in human culture and far removed from any absolute reality. His essay stands out in contemporary philosophy for its daring exploration of how language shapes our experience of the world. It challenges not only the possibility of objective truth but also the assumption that language can ever fully capture reality. His view that language is an arbitr...