Semiology enters the depth-psychology and continental linguistics corpus principally through Benveniste’s sustained interrogation of Saussure’s projected science of signs and through Derrida’s deconstruction of the sign’s metaphysical underpinnings. Benveniste treats semiology not as a finished discipline but as an unfinished program bequeathed by Saussure — one that assigned language the privileged position among sign-systems without adequately theorising the relations among them. His Last Lectures at the Collège de France (1968–9) elaborate this inheritance by distinguishing the semiotic (the realm of the sign as socially recognised unit, finite and inventoriable) from the semantic (the realm of enunciation and living discourse), and by introducing the concept of auto-semiotisation — the reflexive capacity of a language to turn upon itself and become its own object, a capacity uniquely enabled by writing. Benveniste further argues that language, as the sole interpretant of all other semiological systems (music, image, kinship), holds a systematically singular position no other sign-system can occupy. Against this constructive project, Derrida’s reading of Hegel’s theory of the sign in ‘Semiology and Psychology’ exposes the metaphysical economy governing sign-theory at large: the sign as provisional absence oriented toward truth, presence deferred. The tension between Benveniste’s productive, enunciative semiology and Derrida’s deconstructive semiology of the trace constitutes the field’s central polarity.
How is it that there are semiological systems? How many are there? Are they always the same systems or different systems? And if different, in what way? Is there a relation amongst them?
Benveniste identifies the foundational questions Saussure left unanswered, establishing that a genuine semiology must theorise the plurality of sign-systems and the relations among them.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis
It is time now to introduce a new relation into the descriptive and comparative analysis of semiological systems, one that Saussure did not mention and perhaps did not see: the relation of interpretation.
Benveniste advances semiology beyond Saussure by positing interpretation — the capacity of one system to serve as interpretant of another — as the decisive structural relation within any comparative semiological analysis.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis
It is the language as system of expression that is the interpretant of all institutions and of all culture.
Benveniste concludes that language occupies a unique, privileged position within semiology because it alone can interpret every other sign-system and every cultural institution.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis
The time of the sign, then, is the time of referral. It signifies self-presence, refers presence to itself, organizes the circulation of its provisionality.
Derrida, under the heading ‘Semiology and Psychology’, deconstructs the sign as a metaphysical economy in which presence is perpetually deferred and reappropriated — locating semiology within the history of truth as absence.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
The writing system has always and everywhere been the instrument that has permitted a language to semiotise itself.
Benveniste identifies writing as the mechanism of auto-semiotisation — the reflexive process by which a language becomes aware of itself as a system of signs.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis
For Saussure, a language (langue) organises language (langage). He then separates the language (langue) from writing and, negatively,
Benveniste reconstructs Saussure’s foundational distinctions — langue/langage, language/writing — as the conceptual ground from which any semiology of systems must depart.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis
Benveniste proposes two types in the signifiance of language: the semiotic and the semantic. The semiotic (from semeion ‘sign’, characterised by its ‘arbitrary’ link — the result of a social convention — between
The preface summarises Benveniste’s key theoretical innovation: the distinction between semiotic signifiance (sign as social convention) and semantic signifiance (meaning as enunciation), which restructures the Saussurean semiological project.
, 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 translator’s introduction contextualises Benveniste’s 1969 article as a deliberate intervention in the institutional convergence of Saussurean semiology and Peircean semiotics.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
The general theory of signs was glimpsed by John Locke, but the true birth of this theory occurred in two different places… In America it was Charles Sanders Peirce, in Europe, Ferdinand de Saussure.
Benveniste situates semiology historically by identifying its dual founding in Peirce’s logical semiotics and Saussure’s linguistic semiology as parallel but fundamentally divergent traditions.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
sémiologie and sémiotique had taken on a technical distinction in his work
Benveniste insists on maintaining a principled technical difference between sémiologie and sémiotique, resisting their conflation even within institutional contexts that treated them as equivalent.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
No special importance will be attached in this development of ideas to séméiologie or sémeiotique. The ‘less used forms’ like sémiologie or sémiotique… were recognised by the Académie Française in 1762 to denote ‘the area of pathology which treats the signs by which illnesses are detected’
Benveniste traces the pre-linguistic, medical genealogy of the term sémiologie, grounding its modern theoretical use against a longer history of sign-reading in pathology.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
it was in Paris (where French research was exhibiting great dynamism, whether through the Semiology Section of the Social Anthropology Laboratory of the Collège de France, the journal Communications or the publications of Émile Benveniste, Roland Barthes and Algirdas Julien Greimas)
Kristeva’s preface documents the institutional formation of semiology in Paris during the 1960s, identifying Benveniste alongside Barthes and Greimas as its principal architects.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
no semiotic without the semantic. In other words, semiotic ‘signifiance’, lexical meaning, results from the semantic ‘intended’, from the intention to mean.
Benveniste argues for a hierarchical and genetic relation between the semiotic and the semantic, positioning the semantic as the originary ground from which semiotic signs are produced and fixed.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
The language, precisely — unique within the diversity of signifying systems in that it has the capacity to auto-interpret and to interpret other systems (music, image, kinship) — is ‘the interpreting’
The translator’s introduction synthesises Benveniste’s semiological thesis: language’s interpretive universality distinguishes it structurally from all other signifying systems.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
the impossibility of reaching the semantic in language without passing through the semiotic plus the grammar
Benveniste establishes the methodological necessity of the semiotic as an indispensable passage toward the semantic, countering Peirce’s word-based approach to meaning.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
the study of the writing system, which, amongst semiological systems, has long particularly occupied us.
In his 1969 lectures Benveniste positions writing as the semiological system of special analytical priority, extending his inquiry into signifiance toward the materiality of graphic inscription.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
the auto-semiotisation of language is not limited to us. Is it? The questions I am posing arise from the scale of Benveniste’s enquiry, which is the grand historical scale.
The translator raises the question of whether Benveniste’s concept of auto-semiotisation is culturally universal or restricted to literate societies, revealing a productive tension at the edge of his semiological program.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
the types of writing accomplish auto-semiotisation, that is, the becoming aware of the language types to which they correspond (‘the writing system has always and everywhere been the instrument that has permitted a language to semiotise itself’)
Kristeva’s preface reformulates Benveniste’s central semiological claim: different writing systems enact different modes of auto-semiotisation and thus different modes of being in the world.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
It allows the language to semiotise itself… Only this realisation of a secondary form of discourse has made it possible to become aware of discourse in its formal elements and to analyse all its aspects.
Benveniste argues that writing, as secondary semiological system, enables the reflexive analysis of speech, making visible the formal structure that primary oral discourse renders invisible.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012aside
the semiotic necessarily starts from a linguistic material that is given, inventoriable, finite. As signs are ‘given’ all at once, and constitute a finite set, ‘the sign takes on signifiance in an inter-sign space’.
Benveniste characterises the semiotic as the domain of closed, finite sign-sets whose signifiance is relational and differential, contrasting it with the open, generative character of the semantic.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012aside