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THEORIES OF LANGUAGE AND SUBJECTIVITY 189

Derrida’s critique of Saussure
A similar critique of Saussure has been made by the contemporary French
philosopher Jacques Derrida. In Speech and Phenomena he offers a thorough-
going critique of the tradition of rationalist and logical theories of language
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through a critique of Husserl. In his essay ‘Differance’ in this volume and in Of
Grammatology he addresses himself directly to Saussure’s problematic of the
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sign. Derrida argues that Saussure is self-contradictory because, in spite of his
principle of the arbitrary nature of the sign, he remains attached to the
nationalist, ‘logocentric’ tradition in Western metaphysics, which presupposes
the a priori, fixed meaning of concepts. In this tradition language is intrinsically
related to the self-consciousness of rationality. It is what allows the subject to
present her/himself to her/himself. He argues that this entire rationalist
discourse, which includes Saussure, is founded on the concept of language as
speech—speech which comes from conscious, rational minds. His own radically
different approach is founded on a reformulation of the object of linguistics.
Derrida starts from the Saussurean distinction between language as speech and
as writing: ‘Language and writing are two distinct systems of signs; the second
exists for the sole purpose of representing the first. The linguistic object is not both
the written and spoken form of words; the spoken form alone constitutes the
object.’ His main point is that Saussure’s theory of representation here
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contradicts his principle of the arbitrary nature of the sign, since if this is a
general principle, the relations between phonemes (minimum significant units of
sound) and graphemes (minimum significant written elements) must themselves
be arbitrary. Thus there can be no ‘phonetic writing’. Furthermore, Derrida
points out that Saussure privileges the phonic level, as constituting the ‘true’
object of linguistics: in his theory the graphic level must always be secondary. In
short, the phonic level is elevated to a transcendental position. It becomes the
‘transcendental signifier’ or concept, which writing exists solely to ‘represent’.
Derrida makes clear connections between this incidence of ‘phonocentrism’ (the
privileging of the spoken word) and the ‘logocentrism’ (reliance on a priori
transcendental meaning) of Saussure’s theory as a whole.
Derrida’s argument is, of course, extremely complex, and we cannot do justice
to it here. We can only indicate briefly the theoretical value of his critique of
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Saussure and some of its potential limitations. Its value, for us, consists in what
Derrida has to say about the concept of ‘representation’ in general and the
connections between this concept and Saussure’s logocentrism. The point which
Derrida makes is that the ‘logocentric’ perspective requires a ‘naive
representivist’ concept of writing. However, as Derrida points out, the very tone
of the ‘logocentric’ discourse, in its desire to separate out the inner meaning from
its external ‘clothing’, puts us on our guard:

One already suspects that if writing is ‘image’ and exterior ‘figuration’,
this ‘representation’ is not innocent. The outside bears with the inside a