Return to Saussure

Thesis Saussure's theory of value implies that meaning is generated through differential relations within a linguistic system. Translation therefore cannot consist in transferring a signified intact from one language to another. Instead, it involves reinscribing value within a new network of differences. Derrida's reflections on the Hegelian term Aufhebung , which he renders as relève , reveal both the necessity of this operation and its impossibility. Introduction Translation is often understood as the transfer of meaning from one language to another. Dictionaries encourage this assumption by presenting words as though they possessed stable equivalents waiting to be matched across linguistic boundaries. Yet this common view becomes difficult to sustain once language is approached through Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of value. If the meaning of a sign depends not on an intrinsic content but on its relations to other signs, then translation cannot consist in the simp...

Gespräch am See im Sonnenlicht. Impressionismus. AI image Introduction Inquiry rarely proceeds by direct apprehension. What presents itself is already mediated, displaced, deferred. Astronomy offers a familiar case: what is seen in the night sky is not the star as such, but the delayed arrival of its light. The object is given only through a temporal disjunction. Something similar holds in linguistics. As Ferdinand de Saussure observes, the fundamental units of language are not immediately accessible; they must be approached through substitutes that stand in for them. What appears, at first, as a methodological constraint—an epistemological detour—will, in Jean Baudrillard, assume a far more radical status. Saussure’s displacement of substance in favor of relational value remains circumscribed within a system. Baudrillard extends this displacement beyond the linguistic domain, dissolving not only substance but also the guarantee of any underlying structure. The movement is subt...

Introduction Jean Baudrillard’s early work occupies a decisive threshold between Marxist political economy and structural linguistics. Rather than abandoning these traditions, he appropriates their central categories and rearticulates them within a new conceptual configuration. The result is not a simple synthesis but a displacement: economic value and linguistic value are drawn into a shared system in which their underlying logic—exchange, difference, and equivalence—is generalized. This article proposes to read Baudrillard’s theoretical vocabulary as a structured system, a kind of micro-langue , in which each term derives its meaning from its relation to others. By tracing the origins of key concepts in Marx and Saussure, and examining their transformation in Baudrillard’s early writings, we can clarify how his theory of value shifts from a critique of political economy toward a theory of sign circulation. The Marxist Lexicon of Value Baudrillard’s early framework is explicit...

The Revolution of Value. AI image Abstract This article revisits Jean Baudrillard’s account of the “structural revolution of value” in Symbolic Exchange and Death through a close reading of Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of linguistic value. Baudrillard presents contemporary culture as marked by the collapse of referential value and the autonomous circulation of signs. While this thesis appears to radicalize Saussure’s distinction between signification and value, Saussure’s own framework already defines value as differential, internal, and independent of reference. By foregrounding the primacy of relational value in Course in General Linguistics , this article argues that Baudrillard’s “death of reference” presupposes a referential grounding that Saussure had already displaced. The comparison clarifies both the limits of Baudrillard’s rupture narrative and the enduring radicality of Saussure’s conception of value. Introduction The concept of value occupies a central place in bot...