Linguistic Signification

Linguistic signification occupies a pivotal, contested position within the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as the threshold problem of general linguistics and as the site where language theory intersects with questions of subjectivity, consciousness, and the unconscious. Benveniste’s sustained engagement with the term across his Collège de France lectures and the Problèmes de linguistique générale establishes the central problematic: signification names not merely the pairing of signifier and signified but the generative capacity of language to produce meaning at two irreducible levels — the semiotic and the semantic. His concept of signifiance attempts to capture this double movement, distinguishing the recognitional function of the sign from the propositional, enunciative production of discourse. Derrida enters as a critical interlocutor, exposing the classical semiological assumption that signification operates as a deferred trace of presence — a structure he systematically dismantles. The Stoic tradition, mediated through Long and Sedley, contributes a third axis: the predicate as the minimal unit of linguistic signification, anchoring thought to its logical-linguistic correlate. Heidegger’s phenomenological approach and Lacan’s structural reading of the signifying chain further complicate the field. Across these voices, the core tension is between signification as a transparent vehicle of pre-given meaning and signification as a productive, differential operation that constitutes — rather than merely expresses — both thought and subject.

In the library 19 passages

a language belongs to the general system of ‘signification’, that, in its quality as a particular, more elaborated system, it is part of the world of signifying systems, the characteristic of which is to be systems, to present signification as distributed and articulated by principles which are themselves signifying.

Benveniste argues that linguistic signification is not merely a property of individual signs but is systematically organized and reflexively structured, distinguishing language from all other semiological systems.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis

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There was for a long time an insistence on dismissing anything related to the signification of a language, in several ways, by omission

Benveniste surveys the historical suppression of signification as a legitimate object of linguistic inquiry, arguing that behaviourist and distributionalist paradigms systematically evacuated the problem of meaning.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis

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signification as the difference of temporization. And this structure presupposes that the sign, which defers presence, is conceivable only on the basis of the presence that it defers and moving toward the deferred presence that it aims to reappropriate.

Derrida exposes the classical semiological structure of signification as founded upon the metaphysics of deferred presence, a structure he identifies as both secondary and provisional in its own self-understanding.

Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis

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‘Language has as its function to say something. What exactly is this something in view of which language is articulated and how do we delimit it in relation to language itself? The problem of signification is posed’

Benveniste frames the problem of signification as the primary task of linguistics, insisting that the question of what language says cannot be separated from the structural analysis of language itself.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis

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Benveniste proposes two types in the signifiance of language: the semiotic and the semantic.

The distinction between the semiotic mode of linguistic signification — based on sign recognition — and the semantic mode — based on enunciative meaning — constitutes Benveniste’s foundational theoretical contribution.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis

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It is tempting to find another English word, such as ‘signification’ or ‘meaningfulness’, and explain in a note which aspects of signifiance have been lost or camouflaged.

The translator’s dilemma over rendering Benveniste’s technical term signifiance reveals the conceptual distance between conventional notions of linguistic signification and Benveniste’s more expansive, dynamic concept.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting

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the act of signifying is irreducible to communication and institutions, and that it only transcends the ‘given meaning’ through the ‘activity of the speaker put at the centre’.

Benveniste insists that linguistic signification cannot be reduced to social convention or communicative function but is always enacted and individuated through the enunciative act of the speaking subject.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting

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It is, minimally, the signification of a verb. A ‘complete sayable’ is formed by attaching the predicate to a ‘case’.

The Stoic account establishes linguistic signification at the level of the predicate as the minimal incomplete unit, with full propositional signification achieved only through the attachment of a subject-case — a locus classicus for understanding signification as structurally relational.

A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987thesis

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the linguistic sign is put on the same plane as the non-signifying signs of other systems. And in effect, from this proceeds the Saussurean idea of the relative-oppositive entity.

Benveniste critiques Saussure’s levelling of linguistic signification with non-linguistic sign systems, arguing that this conflation obscures the unique capacity of language to generate meaning through sentential continuity.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting

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he resumed his ambition to study the ‘signifying power’ in the properties of language. A path, precisely, which ‘neither says nor hides, but signifies’

The preface frames Benveniste’s entire intellectual project as an investigation into the signifying power intrinsic to language, drawing on the Heraclitean formula to distinguish signification from both declaration and concealment.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting

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It is what one can say which delimits and organizes what one can think. Language provides the fundamental configuration of the properties of things as recognized by the mind.

Derrida, via Benveniste’s reading of Aristotle, argues that linguistic signification is not a neutral vehicle for pre-formed thought but actively delimits the categorial structure of what can be thought.

Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting

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Thought is not language, or a language, Benveniste seems to admit here. But Aristotle deluded himself in practice: because he believed in a table, and especially because, through unconsciousness and empiricism, he confused what he should have distinguished.

Derrida identifies the tension in Benveniste’s position between acknowledging a distinction between thought and linguistic signification in principle and demonstrating their practical inseparability in Aristotle’s categories.

Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting

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seules les corrélations du signifiant au signifiant y donnent l’étalon de toute recherche de signification

Lacan argues that the standard of all search for signification is provided exclusively by signifier-to-signifier correlations, displacing any referential or semantic grounding of linguistic meaning.

Lacan, Jacques, Écrits, 1966supporting

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writing is the ‘relay’ which makes this faculty explicit. In sum, writing makes explicit and definitively reinforces the non-instrumental and non-utilitarian nature of a language, which, because of this and more than ever, is neither a tool, nor communication, nor dead letter, but a ‘signifying organism’

Benveniste redefines language as a self-generating signifying organism, arguing that writing clarifies rather than creates language’s fundamental signifying nature.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting

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the object of these communications be organized, by priority or by privilege, around communication as discourse, or in any event as signification.

Derrida notes the institutional convention that privileges signification as the organizing frame for philosophical discourse, a convention that his own text simultaneously inhabits and interrogates.

Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting

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C’est de F. de Saussure que procède la théorie du signe linguistique actuellement affirmée ou impliquée dans la plupart des travaux de linguistique générale.

Benveniste identifies Saussure as the founding authority for the theory of the linguistic sign upon which contemporary accounts of linguistic signification depend, while preparing to critique its foundations.

Benveniste, Émile, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966supporting

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What is the language’s mode of signifying? It is not a worry about taxonomy that led Saussure to conceive this place for the language.

Benveniste interrogates Saussure’s motivation in granting language primacy among semiological systems, reframing the question around mode of signifying rather than taxonomic classification.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting

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the being communicates with the world and with other individuated beings, discovering significations concerning which it does not know whether they are a priori or a posteriori.

Simondon positions signification within a broader ontogenetic framework, treating the discovery of significations as an operation of individuation that cannot be accomplished by the individual being alone.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020aside

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