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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...

A somewhat mysterious process. AI image Introduction: The Problem of the Text In the preface to the Course in General Linguistics , Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye openly acknowledge the difficulty of their task: “Will critics be able to distinguish between Saussure and our interpretation of Saussure? We hope that any blame may be laid at our door, rather than reflect upon the reputation of someone whose memory we cherish.” This remark is not merely editorial caution, it signals a structural feature of the text itself. What we read as Saussure is already mediated, condensed, and reconstructed. This is especially evident in Part II, Chapter IV, §1 (“The language as thought organised in sound”), where a series of foundational concepts—difference, opposition, sign, value—are introduced in rapid succession, often without explicit transitions. The result is a text that is conceptually dense but logically elliptical. The aim of this article is to reconstruct the implicit logic o...

Introduction Few concepts have exercised such enduring influence over the history of philosophy and linguistics as the sign . From Aristotle’s On Interpretation to Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics , the sign has been treated as a bridge between thought, language, and reality. Yet Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction in Of Grammatology demonstrates that this apparently stable structure is undermined by its own assumptions. By interrogating the metaphysical commitments underlying the sign, Derrida exposes the fragility of notions such as origin, transcendental signified , and logocentrism . This article explores Derrida’s critique in relation to classical and modern accounts of the sign, focusing on Aristotle, Augustine, Jakobson, and Saussure, and culminating in Derrida’s own proposal of arche-writing . The Classical Foundations: Aristotle and Augustine The Western tradition of the sign begins with Aristotle’s Περὶ Ἑρμηνείας ( On Interpretation ). For Aristotle, signs me...