Ricœur and Saussure: On meaning and time

Abstract

This paper attempts to arrange a meeting between Ricœur and Saussure through their texts. Ricœur's reading Saussure reflects a particular limitation of his time, i.e., the structuralism to which we are no longer confined. He criticizes Saussure from a semantic point of view by appealing to the notion of discourse. According to Meschonnic, the discovery in 1996 of a manuscript of Saussure regarding the double essence of language reveals a particular interest in this notion, warranting a revisiting of Saussurean thought and thus reopening a debate on the status of meaning. Ricœur regards the question of meaning as a moment of self-understanding, situated outside the semiotic system in the world of signification. Saussure suggests defining the value of a linguistic unit in relation to its surrounding units. Where the former searches outside the linguistic unit, the latter searches around it: both refuse to remain, as it were, inside it. In this paper, I suggest that they were to be at odds with the question of time when raising the question of meaning. Eager to grasp a meaning that changes from one moment to the next, they relied on notions of system or context to regulate semantic diversity.