Ferdinand de Saussure occupies a foundational yet contested position across the depth-psychology and humanistic linguistics corpus assembled in the Seba library. He appears most densely in Benveniste’s writings, where the Cours de linguistique générale functions simultaneously as a touchstone and a limit to be surpassed. Benveniste credits Saussure with establishing the constitutive arbitrariness of the sign, the langue/langage distinction, and the structural unity of signifiant and signifié — achievements that made modern semiology conceivable — while insisting that Saussure failed to theorise writing as an autonomous semiotic system and left semiology itself as a mere promissory note rather than a working science. The Last Lectures at the Collège de France cast Saussure and Peirce as the twin, mutually ignorant founders of sign theory, with Saussure’s social-linguistic orientation sharply contrasted to Peirce’s logico-mathematical universalism. Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy implicitly inherits Saussurean semiology only to deconstruct the presence-based metaphysics that classical sign theory presupposes. Throughout the corpus, Saussure’s name marks the threshold between historical-comparative linguistics and structural thought — a threshold that each subsequent theorist must cross, renarrate, or subvert.
In America it was Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), in Europe, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). Two solitary and singular minds, neither of whom published anything in his lifetime and whose impact would be posthumous.
Benveniste frames Saussure and Peirce as the co-equal, mutually unknown founders of sign theory, stressing the posthumous and parallel nature of their intellectual revolutions.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis
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… Saussure a enseigné que la nature du signe est arbitraire.
Benveniste identifies Saussure as the irreplaceable origin of the doctrine of the arbitrary sign, the axiom that pervades all subsequent general linguistics.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966thesis
For Saussure, the language is the whole. The sign is an individual and social notion (and not a universal one, as in Peirce).
Benveniste defines Saussure’s decisive methodological move — treating language as a total social system rather than a universal logical calculus — against which Peirce is counterposed.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis
Cette consubstantialité du signifiant et du signifié assure l’unité structurale du signe linguistique. Ici encore c’est à Saussure même que nous en appelons quand il dit de la langue : ‘La langue est encore comparable à une feuille de papier’.
Benveniste invokes Saussure’s own metaphor of the sheet of paper to argue that signifiant and signifié are consubstantial, thereby challenging rather than simply accepting the arbitrary-sign doctrine.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966thesis
Saussure asked none of these questions. He limited himself to assigning a future semiology the task of defining the sign, its place, etc. He said only that the language is the most ‘important’ of semiological systems.
Benveniste marks the precise limit of Saussure’s contribution: he gestured toward a future semiology without constructing one, leaving the comparative study of sign systems undeveloped.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis
At least with Saussure we know where we stand: in society, and not in nature, not in the mind and the universe as with Peirce.
Benveniste credits Saussure with anchoring linguistics firmly in the social domain, contrasting this with Peirce’s cosmological and psychological universalism.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis
In dialogue with Saussure and his conception of signs as the distinctive elements of the linguistic system, Benveniste proposes two types in the signifiance of language: the semiotic and the semantic.
Benveniste’s own semiotic/semantic distinction is presented as a productive dialogue with — and departure from — Saussure’s sign-based structuralism.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
Saussure did not deny the self-evident link between the semiotic and the semantic, but observed methodological scruples whereby he, as a grammarian…
Benveniste defends Saussure against the charge of ignoring meaning, locating his silence on the semantic as methodological caution rather than theoretical blindness.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
For the first time since its posthumous publication in 1916, Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale was being widely read, by an audience that was particularly receptive to it in the wake of the structuralism which had developed based on its principles.
This passage situates the 1960s reception of Saussure within the structuralist moment, explaining how the Cours became both a founding text and a catalyst for Benveniste’s own fame.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
Semiotica was being founded with the intention of bringing together the semiological tradition extending from Saussure with the semiotic one developed by Peirce and reinvigorated by Morris.
The institutional context of Benveniste’s 1969 article shows Saussure’s tradition being brought into dialogue with Peircean semiotics, a convergence that frames Benveniste’s own theoretical intervention.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
Sémiologie and ‘semeiotic’ were the terms used respectively by Saussure and Peirce.
A terminological note that marks the disciplinary boundary between Saussurean sémiologie and Peircean semiotics, the two lineages Benveniste seeks to adjudicate.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
Bloomfield avait écrit du Cours de linguistique générale un compte rendu très élogieux où, faisant mérite à Saussure de la distinction entre langue et parole, il concluait : ‘He has given us the theoretical basis for a science of human speech.’
Benveniste demonstrates that even Bloomfield’s American behaviourist linguistics acknowledged its debt to Saussure’s langue/parole distinction, revealing the global reach of Saussurean foundations.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966supporting
Saussure famously grappled with the problem and opportunity offered by the pair of French words langue and langage.
The passage foregrounds the untranslatability at the heart of Saussure’s conceptual vocabulary, showing how his key distinctions are embedded in the resources of French itself.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
According to this classical semiology, the substitution of the sign for the thing itself is both secondary and provisional: secondary due to an original and lost presence from which the sign thus derives.
Derrida characterises the metaphysical assumptions underwriting classical semiology — the tradition Saussure exemplifies — as grounded in a logic of deferred presence that différance will dismantle.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
Qu’est-ce donc que cet objet, que Saussure érige sur une table rase de toutes les notions reçues?
Benveniste evokes Saussure’s radical epistemological gesture — the tabula rasa rejection of inherited linguistic categories — as the founding moment of structural linguistics.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966aside