SubStance

SubStance 32.1 (2003) 165-171

Saussure, Ferdinand de. Ecrits de linguistique générale. Ed. Simon Bouquet and Rudolf Engler. Paris: Gallimard, 2002. Pp. 353.

That honored contributor to the nineteenth-century disciplines of historical and comparative philology and inventor of such twentieth-century ones as semiotics and structural linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, is often cast as the erratic discoverer who never made the most of his own insights. We hear that Saussure's enunciation of the principle of functional opposition in his Cours de linguistique générale, though clearly and memorably made, left the hard work of systematization to be done by Trubetzkoy and the phonologists of the Prague Linguistic Circle; the consequences of the "zero sign," alluded to fleetingly in the Cours, had to be drawn by Jakobson in the 1930s; the definition that makes language "a form and not a substance" is surrounded in the Cours by such muddled uses of the terms "form" and "substance" that it took Hjelmslev's glossematic approach to sort out the issue into the tetrad of form/substance // content/expression (these examples are drawn from the copious commentary by Tullio de Mauro that makes up the last third of Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, eds. Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Riedlinger, Paris: Payot, 1980). And even worse, we often catch Saussure in flagrant contradiction of his own theories. As Jacques Derrida commented in 1967, it is often necessary "to read Saussure against Saussure" (De la grammatologie, Paris: Minuit, 1967, 77; for similar expressions see also 67, 81, 86, 96, 105-106).

And as Derrida went on to note, Saussure's authorship is something of a public fiction: "it is not unthinkable that one day the wording of the Cours... will take on a suspect appearance in the light of unpublished materials now in preparation. [. . .] Up to what point is Saussure responsible for the Cours compiled and issued after his death? The question is not a new one" (De la grammatologie, 107, note 38). When we read Saussure against Saussure, it is [End Page 165] tempting to imagine that the real Saussure has been ill-served by his editors. As most readers should know, the Bally and Sechehaye text of 1916 "synchronically" (!) merges three different states of the master's course and a further course on phonetics, adds examples and supporting material absent from the original lecture notes, and often seems to misunderstand the points at issue. Scholars of linguistics and of Saussure have long wished for a more faithful representation of the 1907-1911 lectures, and this wish has been partially gratified by the publication of the actual notes of several students in the course and some handwritten notes by Saussure (Robert Godel, ed., Les Sources manuscrites du Cours de linguistique générale, Geneva: Droz, 1957; Rudolf Engler, ed., LeCours de linguistique générale, édition critique, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1968-74).

With these materials, we can surmise much about the lectures that the heavily edited 1916 text does not tell us, and trace some of the inconsistencies to their sources. Finally, the partial publication of Saussure's notes in view of two unfinished projects, on hidden anagrams in Latin poetry and on the transmission of Germanic legends, reveals a Saussure whose "work on the signifier" (as 1970s structuralists would have called it) strangely anticipates Nicholas Abraham's psychoanalytic "decryptings" and Claude Lévi-Strauss's transformational analyses of mythology (Jean Starobinski, ed., Les Mots sous les mots: les anagrammes de Ferdinand de Saussure, Paris: Gallimard, 1971; Rudolf Engler, "Sémiologies saussuriennes," Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 29 [1974-75]: 45-73 and 34 [1980]: 3-16). Surely the Saussure who could do all that would have understood his own work better than the sometimes confused speaker of the Cours! So there are many possible Saussures, but the one we take to be the "real Saussure," the Saussure who understands Saussure, is a conjectural figure spun from our own response to the text and the later developments it has inspired.

Now the search for the real Saussure has more evidence to...