"The Familiar" Revisited: Saussure, Weber, and the Status of Synchrony
Synchronic and Diachronic Linguistics. AI image Questioning "the Familiar" “ If I take the liberty of recalling a distinction that has doubtless become familiar, indeed all too familiar, it is precisely in order to question that familiarity. For what has become familiar is only part of the story .” With this remark, Samuel Weber opens his discussion of Ferdinand de Saussure in Closure and Exclusion . The gesture is hermeneutic : return to what seems settled and reopen it. Yet Weber’s own interpretation of Saussure arguably relies on a “too familiar” image of the Cours de linguistique générale : Saussure as the architect of rigid oppositions—signifier versus signified, synchrony versus diachrony—and as the theorist of pure system, and structural closure. A closer reading of the Cours complicates this picture. Saussure does not present synchrony and diachrony as substantial domains, nor does he treat the bracketing of history as metaphysical exclusion. Rather, he frames t...