signs
The term ‘sign’ occupies a foundational position across the depth-psychology corpus, though the treatments it receives are remarkably heterogeneous. Within the semiological tradition most directly represented by Benveniste’s late lectures, the sign is the central unit of Saussurean linguistics — arbitrary, social, and recognized rather than interpreted — yet Benveniste insists that the sign alone cannot account for the sentence, enunciation, or the full range of human meaning-making. His distinction between the semiotic (the domain of the sign as recognized unit) and the semantic (the domain of discourse as produced meaning) marks the decisive internal tension. Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy subjects the classical semiology of the sign to a more radical interrogation: the sign is revealed as the structure of deferred presence, a monument to the absence it ostensibly mediates. In Hegel’s usage, as Derrida reads it, the sign achieves its most arresting figure as pyramid — the sepulcher of meaning. Beyond linguistics and deconstruction, the sign appears in theological contexts (John’s Gospel, where signs and works are interchangeable indices of divine identity), in Stoic epistemology (sign-inference as the ground of scientific methodology), and in astrological hermeneutics (zodiacal signs as typological containers of planetary influence). What unites these otherwise disparate usages is a shared problematic: the sign both enables and obstructs access to the reality it points toward.
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 articulates the classical semiology of the sign as a structure of deferred presence — secondary, provisional, and oriented toward a lost or promised fullness it can never itself deliver.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
it is impossible to pass from the ‘sign’ to the ‘sentence’… the sign is discontinuous and the sentence is continuous. The enunciation is not an accumulation of signs
Benveniste argues that the Saussurean sign, as the unit of semiotic analysis, is structurally incapable of accounting for the sentence and enunciation, which belong to a fundamentally different order of meaning.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis
they devoted themselves to reflecting on the sign and on meaning. But their education, their methods, their relationship to the object of their research are utterly different
Benveniste establishes that the two founding figures of sign theory — Peirce and Saussure — share a common preoccupation with the sign but diverge irreconcilably in method, scope, and ontological commitment.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis
The sign—the monument-of-life-in-death, the monument-of-death-in-life, the sepulcher of a soul or of an embalmed proper body… is the pyramid
Derrida reads Hegel’s use of the pyramid as the privileged figure for the sign — a monument that conserves life within death, making signification structurally mortuary.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
The sign is an individual and social notion (and not a universal one, as in Peirce). In Saussure, reflection bears upon the language from three points of view: its description, its laws, the nature of its object
Benveniste contrasts the Saussurean sign — individuated and socially constituted — with the Peircean sign, which aspires to logical universality, marking the foundational divergence between the two traditions.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis
The semiotic (from semeion ‘sign’, characterised by its ‘arbitrary’ link – the result of a social convention – between
Benveniste’s preface outlines the semiotic mode of language as rooted in the sign-unit defined by arbitrary social convention, distinguishing it from the semantic level of signifiance operative in discourse.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
Far from abandoning the ‘sign’, signifiance includes it in ‘discourse’ as an intersubjective illocutionary act which transmits ‘ideas’
Benveniste’s concept of signifiance does not discard the sign but subsumes it within a broader theory of discourse, where meaning is constituted through intersubjective enunciative acts.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
it is inaccurate, taking into account the entire set of manifestations of writing, to say that writing is the sign of the language, which is itself the ‘sign’ of what is ‘thought’. We cannot say that writing is a sign of a sign
Benveniste challenges the received hierarchical model of language as sign of thought and writing as sign of language, arguing that writing’s semiotic status is irreducible to secondary representation.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
Writing is speech converted by the hand into speaking signs. Hand and speech work jointly in the invention of writing. The hand prolongs speech.
Benveniste reconceives writing not as a derivative sign-system but as a secondary corporeal relay of speech, in which the hand extends the primary semiotic act of vocalization.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
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 notes that Saussure left the fundamental questions of semiology — the nature, taxonomy, and interrelation of signs — programmatic rather than resolved, assigning priority to language on pragmatic grounds alone.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
it is inherently ambiguous and stands in need of interpretation — interpretation that can be accepted, misunderstood, or rejected. For John, Jesus’ signs point to the reality that he is one with God
In Johannine theology, the sign is an inherently ambiguous pointer to divine reality that requires interpretive reception, making it simultaneously revelatory and a site of misrecognition.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
the very example cited above from 51H is treated as unsound by these later Stoics at G 2, along with the entire class of inductive inferences… inductive signs threaten to be ‘common’ signs, i.e. not guaranteed to distinguish the true from the false
The Stoic epistemological tradition distinguishes valid sign-inference from inductive sign-reasoning, arguing that signs functioning inductively fail to secure the logical necessity required for scientific demonstration.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
those who lack expertise are the ones who foretell the future not by reason or conjecture through empirical observation of signs, but by either stimulating or relaxing the mind
The Stoic theory of divination distinguishes technical sign-reading (empirical, inferential) from non-technical prophetic states, locating the sign at the intersection of epistemology and mantic practice.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
No system apart from a language carries the possibility for the signs of the said system 1. to form sets constituting new units
Benveniste argues for the unique generative capacity of linguistic signs — their ability to combine into higher-order units — as the property that distinguishes language from all other semiological systems.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
‘Oute légei, oute krúptei, alla semaínei’ (unless it translates the unpronounceable tetragram YHWH: the being identified with what is and will be, with ‘signifiance’) that he resumed his ambition to study the ‘signifying power’ in the properties of language
The Heraclitean formula — neither saying nor hiding but signifying — is invoked as the autobiographical key to Benveniste’s project, aligning his linguistic theory of signifiance with an ancient problematic of the sign that neither declares nor conceals.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012aside
bok-stafr, the ‘little rod’, the ‘sign’, like Buchstabe ‘letter’ in German; runa-stafr is the ‘stroke of runic writing’, magical (runa means ‘secret’)
In tracing the etymology of words for the written letter, Benveniste uncovers a semantic field in which the material mark, the sign, carries connotations of secrecy, fate, and magical inscription.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012aside
we shall never have the linguistic side that could be linked to these signs
In examining prehistoric graphic traces, Benveniste acknowledges the interpretive limit of semiology: without access to the spoken language, the status of ancient marks as signs remains undecidable.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012aside