Lost and not found: The Course in General Linguistics between “Saussurism” and “Saussurology”

Abstract

Abstract Saussure’s quest for constitutive features of language resulted in his formulation of two fundamental principles: first, the bipolarity of the sign, according to which neither form nor meaning of a sign exists as of itself, outside of their mutual relation; and second, the arbitrariness of that relation, i.e., the fact that their link is based solely on convention. The purely relational nature of language, the fact that its entities have no positive identity of their own result in the unceasing development of language whose direction and results can be neither programmed nor predicted. In the first half of the twentieth century, Saussure’s idea of language as a pure “structure” was interpreted in a static way, as a matrix of relations whose elements occupy secure positions in the overall relational network. When critique of the structural approach has been raised in the 1960–1980s, Saussure’s champions tried to distance Saussure’s “genuine” views, ostensibly expressed in his private papers, from his posthumously published Course, which was declared unreliable or even falsified. The present paper argues that the problem with interpreting Saussure arises primarily from the way his works were read by different generations and in different intellectual contexts. Saussure’s work needs to be examined in the context of its own time, as an integral part of the philosophical revolution of the turn of the twentieth century.