“This eternal wanderer”: A non-dogmatic reading of Saussure

Abstract

Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916) has been widelyreceived as a dogmatic text, putting forward a reductivist conception of the languagesystem. Yet there are grounds for reading it very differently, as Roman Jakobson(1969) did when writing of Saussure’s “dynamic repugnance toward the‘vanity’ of any ‘definitive thought’”. Henri Meschonnic blamed “structuralists” (alabel which, of course, gets applied to Jakobson himself) for turning Saussure’slinguistics of the continuous into a dogmatic “scientism of the discontinuous”.Meschonnic’s list of structuralist distortions of Saussure is the framework for theargument presented here in favour of a non-dogmatic reading of the Cours.

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