Jacques Derrida is one of the foremost thinkers associated with “poststructuralism,” a tendency in the latter half of the twentieth century to overturn structuralism. The disjuncture between the two hinges on a whole constellation of theoretical and attitudinal differences, but perhaps above all, their differing conceptions of language, signification, and meaning. Derrida assails what he sees as the hegemonic approach to signification and language, attempting to undermine its metaphysical foundations and elevate the written word from its historically subordinate position in the philosophy of language and meaning.
Saussure and Structuralism
Ferdinand de Saussure delivered his Course in General Linguistics in Geneva between 1907 and 1911. The series of lectures by Saussure overhauled the discipline of linguistics and proposed a strikingly novel approach to understanding language. This approach, now inseparable from “structuralism,” entailed the systematization of semiotics, the study of signification. The impact of Saussure’s lectures reached far beyond the boundaries of academic linguistics. Structuralism became an essential part of the intellectual landscape of the mid-twentieth century, influencing philosophy, psychology (and especially psychoanalysis, literary criticism, sociology, anthropology, and art history.
In the Course, Saussure lays out his linguistic system in terms of the “sign,” which is composed of two parts: the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the verbal utterance, and the signifier is the correlated concept. The two elements of the sign are at once inseparably conjoined and arbitrary in their linkage; the phonetic representation of the word “comb” and the idea of a comb are not tethered together by some special and innate affinity, but they intimately and bound up with and in one another. It should be noted that the entirety of the sign is immaterial—Saussure judged that whatever the link was between the sign and its material referent, it was not the work of linguistics to theorize it.
The Linguistic Sign
The signifier—the phonetic side of the two-faced sign—in Saussure’s work means not the physical sound, the sound waves in the world that we parse as phonemes, but what he calls “the psychological imprint of the sound” (Course in General Linguistics, 1916). The whole business of signification in Saussure’s semiotics is mental, though it should be noted that he stresses that language is nonetheless a “concrete” phenomenon. Saussure justifies this understanding of the signifier by pointing to the internal voice and its strictly mental use of phonetic sound-impressions. Saussure writes:
The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image. The latter is not the material sound, a purely physical thing, but the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression it makes on our senses. The sound-image is sensory, and if I happen to call it ‘material,’ it is only in that sense, and by way of opposing it to the other term of the association, the concept, which is generally more abstract. The psychological character of our sound-images becomes apparent when we observe our own speech. Without moving our lips or tongue, we can talk to ourselves or recite a selection of verses mentally (Course in General Linguistics, 1916).
What Is Logocentrism?
Notably, the text we refer to today as the Course in General Linguistics is not a book written by Saussure or a collection of Saussure’s lecture transcripts. Rather, the book is based on an amalgamation of notes taken by two of Saussure’s students: Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Published after Saussure’s death, it is this amalgam that has been the medium through which Saussure’s ideas have been transmitted and through which they have reached their most receptive audience. This means of transmission is noteworthy because it is precisely the distinction between the spoken and written word that Derrida presses in his critique of Saussurean semiotics.
“Logocentrism” describes a general tendency in the history of Western thought, and especially in the history of philosophy since Socrates (Derrida’s Of Grammatology begins by quoting Nietzsche: “Socrates, he who does not write”) to privilege the spoken utterance as the site of meaning and linguistic being. The mention of Socrates is useful as it leads us to Derrida’s essay “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in which he discusses philosophy’s millennia-old fixation on the living word as the essential unit of thought, juxtaposed with the “dead” word of the written text. In the essay, Derrida unpicks Plato’s notion that the written text is prone to deceitfulness and turns Plato’s argument upon itself, suggesting that there is a kind of honesty in the fixity of writing, even if that fixity also comes with ambivalence.
Joys in Contradictions
Where Plato derides writing for all the possible (mis)interpretations that may proceed from a single text, Derrida’s revels in polysemy and ambivalence, highlighting that the Greek pharmakon has many, sometimes contradictory, meanings, all of which are held in tension at the same time every time we read the word. By contrast, with the Platonic veneration of the “living” word, the philosopher longs for the opportunity to interrogate the speaker, to ask “When you say pharmakon do you mean ‘remedy’ or ‘poison,’ or something else altogether?” After all, the Socratic dialectic aims to aim at exactly the abolition of this kind of ambivalence by stripping away interpretation and divergence through sustained questioning.
Logocentrism is the tendency to assert the priority of the voice, of the spoken word, in the theology of the divine logos, the tendency to treat the written word as secondary, derivative, and further from truth and nature than speech. In his book Of Grammatology (1967), Derrida argues that logocentrism always implies a long tradition of phonocentrism.
Derrida’s Critique of Saussure’s Linguistics
Much of Derrida’s vocabulary is taken directly from Saussure’s Course; Derrida speaks in terms of signs, signifiers, and signifieds (albeit in rather more varied relations with one another than in Saussure’s lectures). Derrida’s direct references to Saussure are scattered. Still, he most directly confronts the ideas from the Course in Of Grammatology, where Derrida begins the second chapter—”Linguistics and Grammatology”—by quoting Rousseau on speech and writing: “Writing is nothing but the representation of speech; it is bizarre that one gives more care to the determining of the image than to the object.”
The line from Rousseau captures succinctly the attitude that Derrida calls logocentric; for Rousseau, as for Plato and a whole host of medieval Aristotelian theologians, the written word is secondary and unworthy of specific interest, unworthy of precisely the kind of hermeneutic attention that Derrida wants to give to texts. As “Plato’s Pharmacy” exemplifies, Derrida’s interest as a critic is in investigating what writing says of its own accord, what it communicates over authorial intention or awareness, and what a text or word communicates despite or against itself. If the sophistry of the Socratic living word is that the speaker gets to twist their words and meanings to adapt to their audience, the honesty and force of the written word is that it cannot foreclose any of its meanings for the reader. Its connotative riches and several meanings remain up for grabs.
Honing in on the Problem
Derrida’s specific problem with Saussure is that Course is self-defeating in its argumentative structure. Having established that for Aristotle, Rousseau, Hegel, and Saussure alike, writing is only a “sign of sign,” at a double-remove from the signified and perhaps even a triple-remove from the object-referent of the written word, Derrida turns to Saussure’s discussion of the arbitrariness of the signifier to interrogate the primacy of speech over writing.
What Derrida is picking at is the internal tension of Saussure’s argument. On the one hand, Derrida argues, Saussure is making a radical break with metaphysics in establishing the signifier-signified relationship as (1) strictly mental and internal and (2) absolutely arbitrary. These two claims resist the Adamic conception of language, where a natural, essential, and representational affinity exists between spoken words and physical objects.
On the other hand, Derrida suggests Saussure persists in excluding writing from what he calls “the internal system of the language.” In other words, writing remains a step removed from language, an image of the signifier. Derrida argues that the secondary, derivative role accorded to writing by Saussure does not square with the arbitrariness of signification. Instead, it betrays the age-old phonocentrism lurking behind the apparent radicalism of the Course, a phonocentrism which, in its elevation of the pre-linguistic internal voice-over textual language, is, in fact, precisely in service of metaphysics.
For Derrida, Saussure is not making as radical a break as he purports to. Rather, Saussure merely shifts the arena from world to mind without dealing with what is fundamentally awry in the signifier-signified split: that the two pretend to be independent of one another.
