Saussure’s Doubts: Notes Regarding the Power of Disjunctions in the Life of Languages

Abstract

About the editors of the Cours de Linguistique Générale Roman Jakobson said pointedly that, where the materials used suggested a question mark, they had chosen to put a conclusive point. New documents - which in turn allow us to see the old ones in a different light - gradually led to a reading at a remove from the assertive style of the Cours and particularly its pretension to constitute an "organic whole". The focus shifted to the tensions and fluctuations of the writings of Saussure and, consequently, to its subtractive and dissolving effects. Along this line, in this paper I review some of the disjunctions analyzed by Saussure in De l' essence double du langage and other texts, such as those between the multiplicity of linguistic phenomena and the centrality of the principles that shape them; between transformation and continuity; between the synchronic and diachronic, as well as those among the consequences of order and disorder in the life of languages. Given these disjunctions, I ask whether Saussure was searching to reduce or to compatibilize such terms, or whether he was rather confronting their heterogeneity, and even radicalizing for this purpose their differences. This sequence of contrapositions leads to further questions about the happening of language and the search for possible guidance departing from what Saussure allows us to glimpse about "non-being" and negativity as constitutive linguistic - and therefore cultural - factors.