Signification occupies a central and contested site within the depth-psychology corpus, operating at the intersection of linguistics, semiology, phenomenology, and psychoanalytic theory. Benveniste provides the most sustained engagement, distinguishing signification — the structured, organised emergence of meaning at the level of the utterance — from his more encompassing neologism signifiance, which names the general condition of being meaningful prior to any particular communicative act. For Benveniste, signification is organised in language at two levels, arising necessarily as soon as enunciation occurs. Derrida approaches signification as a metaphysical structure implicated in the deferral of presence, reading it as constitutively relational to the sign’s movement away from and toward a deferred plenitude — a structure he subjects to deconstruction. Heidegger employs ‘signification’ in the phenomenological register, tracking how the announcing and showing functions of phenomena bear on primordial disclosure. In the Stoic tradition, as reconstructed by Long and Sedley, signification is the logical property of predicates as incomplete sayables. Lacan situates it within the sliding relation of signifier to signifier rather than any stable signifier-to-signified correspondence. Simondon locates signification in the collective dimension of individuation, where it emerges through transindividual participation rather than from isolated subjectivity. What binds these positions is the shared recognition that signification is never a simple naming but a dynamic relational process whose conditions are irreducibly structural, temporal, and intersubjective.
Signification is organised in a language at two levels.
Benveniste proposes that signification is not a simple or unitary process but a structured, bi-level organisation intrinsic to linguistic functioning, corresponding to his two modes of signifiance.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis
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
Derrida identifies signification with the classical semiological structure of deferred presence, in which the sign is both secondary to and oriented toward a presence it can never fully reappropriate.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
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 situates language within a general semiological field defined by signification as a distributed, self-articulating property of sign systems, distinguishing it from all non-linguistic systems.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis
The problem of signification is posed… As soon as enunciation occurs, there is signification, which entails structur
Benveniste presents signification as co-originary with enunciation itself, such that the emergence of structured meaning is inseparable from the act of speaking.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis
The Collective as Condition of Signification… Subjectivity and Signification; the Transindividual Character of Signification
Simondon argues that signification is not a property of isolated subjects but is conditioned by the collective and is constitutively transindividual in character.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis
There was for a long time an insistence on dismissing anything related to the signification of a language, in several ways, by omissi
Benveniste frames the recovery of signification as a polemical reversal of Behaviourist and distributional linguistics, which had systematically excluded meaning from scientific study.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis
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. The discovery of these significations is a posteriori, for there must be an operation of individuation in order for these significations to appear
Simondon locates the discovery of significations within the process of individuation, arguing that meaning arises operationally rather than being given in advance to an already-constituted subject.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
The pyramid becomes the semaphor of the sign, the signifier of signification.
Derrida reads Hegel’s figure of the pyramid as the sign of signification itself — a monument to the structure in which life and death, presence and absence, are gathered under the movement of dialectical meaning.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
a predicate is the main type of ‘incomplete sayable’. It is, minimally, the signification of a verb.
In the Stoic logical framework, signification is the minimal content of a predicate — the incomplete sayable that acquires propositional completeness only when attached to a subject-case.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
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 note registers ‘signification’ as a candidate but inadequate English rendering of Benveniste’s technical term signifiance, clarifying the conceptual distinction between the two.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
signifiance includes it in ‘discourse’ as an intersubjective illocutionary act which transmits ‘ideas’. Signifiance is a syntagmatic organisation comprising the various types of syntactic constructions
Benveniste distinguishes signifiance from mere signification by embedding the sign within discourse and intersubjective enunciation, thereby expanding the scope of meaningful organisation beyond the isolated sign.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
seules les corrélations du signifiant au signifiant y donnent l’étalon de toute recherche de signification
Lacan insists that the standard for any inquiry into signification is established not by a signifier-to-signified relation but exclusively by the correlations of signifiers among themselves.
, Écrits, 1966supporting
the pictured scenes, in the impression they produce, closely approach the character of symbols or figures, even in cases where it is not possible to trace any symbolic or figural signification.
Auerbach notes that medieval scenic technique generates symbolic pressure approaching figural signification even when no traceable symbolic or typological intent can be established.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
fills in the signification of the term ‘temporality’. In our terminological use of this expression, we must hold ourselves aloof from all those significations of ‘future’, ‘past’, and ‘Present’ which thrust themselves upon us from the ordinary conception of time.
Heidegger delimits the specific phenomenological signification of temporality against the ordinary temporal significations that distort its primordial sense.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
in so far as a phenomenon is constitutive for ‘appearance’ in the signification of announcing itself through something which shows itself
Heidegger employs signification in the narrow phenomenological sense of the announcing function by which a phenomenon constitutes appearance as the showing of something that simultaneously conceals.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
It is controversial whether indeed the primordial signification of locative expressions is adverbial or pronominal.
Heidegger raises in passing the question of the primordial signification of spatial locatives, using it to establish the existential priority of Dasein’s orientation over grammatical categorisation.
, Being and Time, 1962aside
A symbol always presupposes that the chosen expression is the best possible description or formulation of a relatively unknown fact
Jung implicitly delimits the problem of signification by opposing the symbol, whose referent remains indeterminate, to the sign, whose signification is fixed and conventional.
, Psychological Types, 1921aside