Saussure rereads Derrida

Abstract

The article aims to show that although both Derrida and Saussure draw their reproblematising power from a similar analysis of language as critical crux, their conceptions of language actually determine very different modes, but also very different degrees, of critical force. It seeks to measure what differentiates Derrida's eventual epistemology of the ‘impossible’, and Saussure's reinvention of linguistics as a radically critical and ‘historical discipline’, and to understand the astonishing erosion of criticality in deconstructionist ambition which had launched, with well-known audacity, into a full-bodied critical engagement with the whole of the western metaphysical tradition. This questioning of the ‘performativity of aporia’, which is still the critical claim of deconstruction, is based on something which might sound paradoxical in view of the usual identification of Derrida with textualism: the idea that his critique of linguistics and the logos ends in an actual denial of language. This being so in turn constitutes a serious obstacle to the work of critique. The development is based on a rereading of mainly De la Grammatologie and Le Monolinguisme de l'autre, in dialogue with Saussure's Cours and Ecrits. It examines the implications (critical and political) of several key concepts, as derived by Derrida from his ongoing reading/obscuring of Saussure's own concepts: différance, écriture, idiome and différence des langues, férance, radical.