Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations and Textual Notes
- Introduction
- 1 Classical Semiology
- 2 The Originality of Saussure
- 3 The Concept of the Sign
- 4 Writing, Speech, and the Voice
- 5 The Sign as Representation
- 6 Linguistic Identity
- 7 The Sign and Time
- 8 The Horizon of Language
- Conclusion
- List of Works by Derrida and Saussure
- References
- Index
Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations and Textual Notes
- Introduction
- 1 Classical Semiology
- 2 The Originality of Saussure
- 3 The Concept of the Sign
- 4 Writing, Speech, and the Voice
- 5 The Sign as Representation
- 6 Linguistic Identity
- 7 The Sign and Time
- 8 The Horizon of Language
- Conclusion
- List of Works by Derrida and Saussure
- References
- Index
Summary
In his translator's introduction to Writing and Difference, Alan Bass notes that:
Derrida has closed each of the essays on Jabès with the name of one of Jabès's imaginary rabbis: Rida and Derissa. In this way he alerts us to the ‘latent’, philosophically ‘unconscious’ impact of Writing and Difference: an expanded concept of difference through the examination of writing. Derrida's rebus-like play on his own name across this volume reminds us how unlike the Book this one is. (Bass 1978: xx)
Which helps to explain the exasperation of theorists such as Searle or Harris when all that Derrida offers might be a pun (or a lexical association, or an etymology, or a rebus-like play on his own name) in the place of sustained argument. Such wordplay, Christopher Norris suggests, will strike many Anglo-American scholars as ‘a kind of sophistical doodling on the margins of serious, truth-seeking discourse’ (79). In this investigation I have taken the position that Derrida's rhetorical strategy has a finite validity that is entirely rigorous, and not at all a matter of confusion or of deliberate abuse. Certain elements of Derrida's strategy, however, are difficult to refute without risking being accused of completely missing the point. I have taken on this task in the belief that making the discourses of Derrida and Saussure engage is at least partly possible, that the failures of engagement will be as illuminating as the successes, and, in the end, that a coherent resistance to the Derridean reading of Saussure can be made.
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- Information
- What if Derrida was wrong about Saussure? , pp. 172 - 186Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011