Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Burns. The Purloined Hegel Semiology in The Thought of Saussure and Derrida
Burns. The Purloined Hegel Semiology in The Thought of Saussure and Derrida
ABSTRACT
This paper explores the thought of Hegel, Saussure and Derrida regard-
ing the nature of the linguistic sign. It argues that Derrida is right to
maintain that Hegel is an influence on Saussure. However, Derrida mis-
represents both Hegel and Saussure by interpreting them as falling
within the Platonic rather than the Aristotelian philosophical tradition.
Key words Derrida, Hegel, linguistics, Saussure, semiology
INTRODUCTION
These, like the over-largely lettered signs and placards of the street,
escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious; and here the
physical oversight is precisely analogous with the moral inapprehen-
sion by which the intellect suffers to pass unnoticed those consider-
ations which are too obtrusively and too palpably self-evident. (Edgar
Allan Poe)1
A number of commentators have emphasized the importance of Hegel for
our understanding of Derrida’s approach to philosophy in general. For
example, in the preface to her English translation of Of Grammatology,
Gayatri Spivak suggests that ‘Hegel’s shadow upon Derrida is diffuse and
01 Burns (jl/d) 7/11/00 3:23 pm Page 2
gigantic’ (Spivak, 1976: liv). Michael Kelly has maintained that an ‘important
part’ of Derrida’s development of deconstructionism ‘has passed through a
critical reflection on Hegel, who consequently haunts much of his writings’
(Kelly, 1992: 43). And Vincent Descombes has maintained that because for
Derrida ‘the language of philosophy is irremediably Hegelian’, then it
follows that the question ‘At what distance does Derrida stand from Hegel?’
is a crucial question for anyone who is interested in Derrida’s thought
(Descombes, 1980: 139–40, 148). It was only to be expected therefore that, as
Stuart Barnett has recently done, someone would eventually produce a work
devoted to a general consideration of the connection that exists between the
thought of Derrida and that of Hegel (Barnett, 1998). On the other hand,
however, it must also be said that it is surprising that the work in question
does not contain a single chapter dealing with Derrida’s views on semiology,
and with the relationship that exists between Derrida and Hegel regarding
this particular aspect of Derrida’s thought.
Any treatment of this subject requires at least some discussion of the work
of Saussure, and especially of the connection between the views of Saussure
and those of Hegel with respect to questions of semiology. For it is Saussure,
and his Course in General Linguistics (Saussure, 1974), who stands as the vital
intermediary between Hegel and Derrida with respect to these questions.2
Even a very cursory reading of the Course suggests that the similarities
between Saussure’s account of the nature of the linguistic sign and that advo-
cated by Hegel in his Philosophy of Mind are striking.
In our view, therefore, it comes as no surprise that in ‘The Pit and the
Pyramid’, an essay devoted to Hegel’s semiology, Derrida should claim that
semiology, in the sense in which this term is employed by Saussure, lies ‘at
the centre, and not in the margins or the appendix, of Hegel’s Logic’ (sic).
Neither is it a surprise that Derrida should take the view that Hegel’s Philos-
ophy of Mind contains ‘the entire theory of the sign’ as it was later to be devel-
oped by Saussure. Nor, finally, is it a surprise that Derrida should claim that
it was, therefore, Hegel who first ‘inherited’ the ‘opposition of sign and
symbol and the teleology which systematically orients it’ and that ‘after
Hegel’ it is the ‘same opposition and the same teleology’ which ‘maintain
their authority’ in Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (Derrida, 1982b:
1, 83, 86).3 In fact the only thing which is surprising about Derrida’s treat-
ment of the relationship between Hegel and Saussure is the fact that Derrida
devotes so little attention to the discussion of it. There is no separate chapter
on Hegel in Derrida’s Of Grammatology, and Hegel is referred to only infre-
quently there. Derrida does discuss Hegel briefly (as a precursor of gram-
matology rather than of structuralism) in one of the essays, namely ‘The End
of the Book and the Beginning of Writing’ (Derrida, 1976b: 24–6). Indeed, he
describes Hegel there as being ‘the last philosopher of the book and the first
thinker of writing’ – a comment that has led Geoffrey Strickland to maintain
01 Burns (jl/d) 7/11/00 3:23 pm Page 3
T HE P URL OINE D HE GE L 3
S E M I O L O G Y I N H E G E L’ S P H I L O S O P H Y O F M I N D
T HE P URL OINE D HE GE L 5
T HE P URL OINE D HE GE L 7
The linguistic entity [sign] exists only through the associating of the sig-
nifier with the signified. . . . Whenever only one element is retained, the
01 Burns (jl/d) 7/11/00 3:23 pm Page 9
T HE P URL OINE D HE GE L 9
For Saussure, as John Sturrock rightly points out, in language (langage) there
can actually be no pure sounds – no signifiers without signifieds. All sounds,
in so far as they are incorporated within a language, are imbued with some
meaning or other. And similarly, in a living language the purely conceptual
element is always and necessarily associated with the spoken word, and hence
with some phonic element or other. Just as there cannot actually be any pure
sounds, so also, strictly speaking, there cannot actually be any pure thoughts
either. The idea of a pure thought, that is to say, a thought which is not actu-
ally articulated in the words of a particular language, is indeed nothing more
than an intellectual abstraction, albeit one which is useful for students of lin-
guistics (Sturrock, 1986: 14; Sturrock, 1979: 6).
Like Hegel, Saussure takes the view that the linguistic sign, understood as
a concrete entity, should always be thought of as an articulated unity of a uni-
versal (an idea or concept, the signified) with a particular (a specific sound,
the signifier). There is at least one sense, therefore, in which it cannot be
correct to say, as Jonathan Sturrock does, that ‘the Saussurean sign’ is an
‘abstract object’ (Sturrock, 1986: 15). Indeed, Saussure himself explicitly
denies that this is the case in the Course. For example, at one point he insists
that linguistic signs ‘are not abstractions’ (Saussure, 1974: 15). With respect
to this issue, therefore, we are in agreement with David Holdcroft when he
states that the principle that signs are ‘concrete rather than abstract objects’
is a ‘fundamental part of Saussure’s theory’ (Holdcroft, 1991: 169).
As is well known, Saussure makes another important theoretical distinc-
tion in the Course between what he calls ‘language’ [langue], on the one hand,
and ‘speech’ [parole] on the other (Saussure, 1974: 9, 13).11 He usually associ-
ates speech with the use of the spoken word. It is words, in so far as they are
(meaningful) sounds, which are the fundamental units of speech. The world
of speech, therefore, is the world of the signifier. Saussure associates speech
in this sense with the idea of individual performance (Saussure, 1974: 8, 14).
It is particular persons, living in particular societies at particular times, who
speak. Saussure suggests that if communication by means of speech is to be
possible then there must be some rules which regulate the performance of the
individual speaker. This underlying system of rules is what Saussure means
by a language, in the narrow sense of this term (langue). The world of lan-
guage, in this narrow sense, is the world of the signified. In Saussure’s
opinion, it is language in this narrow sense which makes speech possible
(Saussure, 1974: 73–4).
From the standpoint of Hegelian philosophy, it is ‘language’ in the narrow
sense that constitutes the underlying essence or reality underpinning the
01 Burns (jl/d) 7/11/00 3:23 pm Page 10
T HE P URL OINE D HE GE L 11
language (langue) and speech (parole) are at the same time necessarily inter-
connected. For although language and speech are ‘two absolutely distinct
things’, nevertheless they are also mutually ‘interdependent’ (Saussure, 1974:
18). As Roland Barthes has pointed out, one could say that they are dialecti-
cally or reciprocally related to one another (Barthes, 1973: 15–16). Thought
of in this way, they can again only be separated in thought and not in reality.
Like the concepts of signifier and signified, the concepts which we have of
language and speech, to the extent that they can be considered separately
from one another at all, are once again merely convenient abstractions. An
extremely important implication of this is that, from Saussure’s point of view,
there can be no thought at all without language. Or rather, to put the point
more precisely, there can be no conceptual thought without language in the
broadest sense of that term (langage). For all conceptual thought requires the
use of words. Hence, precisely because words are meaningful sounds, all con-
ceptual thought is inevitably associated with at least some phonic element or
other. From the standpoint of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics the
idea that there might actually be a pure conceptual thought without the use
of words is a contradiction in terms. As Saussure himself puts it, what we cer-
tainly should never do is to assume that ‘ready-made ideas exist before words’
(Saussure, 1974: 65–6, 111–12).
The theoretical distinction between that which is essential and that which
is accidental in language is intimately associated with what Sausssure, follow-
ing Hegel, refers to as ‘the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign’ (Saussure,
1974: 67–9). Like Hegel before him, one of the things which Saussure means
by this is that there is no obvious rational or logical connection between a
particular signified, an idea or a concept, and the particular word, understood
as a pure sound, which in a particular language is the signifier for it. There is,
however, an ambiguity about Saussure’s claim regarding the arbitrary nature
of the sign. At first sight it is not entirely clear what it is that Saussure thinks
is arbitrary. Is it the signifier or the signified? Everything we have said so far
seems to suggest that what is arbitrary is the signifier. Indeed, as Timpanaro
rightly points out, the term ‘sign’ is often used by Saussure as ‘a synonym for
“signifier” ’ (Timpanaro, 1980b: 156). It is not at all obvious, therefore, that
Saussure thinks that the signified (i.e. the corresponding concept) is arbitrary
as well.
The Hegelian interpretation of Saussure presented above is very far from
suggesting, as Jonathon Sturrock does, that the meaning which is to be attrib-
uted to the signified in a particular language is ‘an open question’ and that
structuralists generally ‘invite us to delight in the plurality of meaning’ that
might be associated with a particular signified or sign. Nor, therefore, is this
reading of Saussure to be associated with any rejection of an ‘authoritarian
or unequivocal interpretation of signs’ of the sort which Sturrock associates
with structural linguistics generally (Sturrock, 1979: 15; see also Norris, 1982:
01 Burns (jl/d) 7/11/00 3:23 pm Page 13
T HE P URL OINE D HE GE L 13
5). With respect to this issue we entirely agree with J. G. Merquior when he
points out that Jonathan Culler’s claim that Saussure commits himself to the
principle of the arbitrary nature of the signified, as well as that of the signi-
fier, ‘is rather hard to square with the well known fact that Saussure himself
in the Course in General Linguistics stresses that the “same signified” exists
both for the French “boeuf” and for the German “ochs” ’ (Merquior, 1988:
231–2). Merquior points out that ‘while we know by heart Saussure’s dicta
on the normally arbitrary signifier, no general statement of his has yet been
adduced that can be taken to assert a normal arbitrariness of signifieds’
(Merquior, 1988: 231–2; see also Scholes, 1985: 89–90; Watts, 1983: 25). The
pluralist (or relativist) reading of Saussure advocated by Sturrock, Norris and
Culler is highly selective because it ignores altogether the more traditional
assumptions regarding language upon which at least some of Saussure’s
Course is based.
On a Hegelian reading of Saussure, the differences which exist between
different languages are to be found at the level of the signifier only, and not
at the level of the signified. As in the case of Hegel, there does at times appear
to be a commitment on Saussure’s part to the quite traditional idea that it is
the principal task of all languages, in their different ways, to grasp, describe
or name the essential nature of things (Hegel, 1971: 216–18). Like Hegel,
Saussure often gives the impression in the Course that, in his view, all people
everywhere do in fact think in much the same way. With respect to this issue,
and again like Hegel, Saussure might be said to be a theorist whose intellec-
tual assumptions are firmly rooted in the presuppositions of the modern or
even the premodern rather than the postmodern age. It could be argued that
a pluralist or relativist interpretation of Saussure amounts, in effect, to
turning him into a poststructuralist thinker avant la lettre.
We cannot, therefore, agree with Timpanaro’s observation that the claim
that Hegelianism had a ‘genuine influence on Saussure’s thought is one which
should be treated with caution’ (Timpanaro, 1980b: 150). On the contrary, in
our view an acceptance of the validity of this claim is an essential prerequi-
site for an adequate understanding of Saussure’s thought generally, and
especially for an understanding of the technical vocabulary of the Course in
General Linguistics. As Derrida rightly suggests, Saussure’s Course is in many
respects a quintessentially Hegelian text.
D E R R I D A’ S I N T E R P R E TAT I O N O F T H E
SEMIOLOGY OF HEGEL AND SAUSSURE
Derrida sees his own discussion of Hegel’s semiology and of Hegel’s influ-
ence on Saussure in his essay ‘The Pit and the Pyramid’ as being simply a con-
tinuation of the analysis of Saussurean linguistics which he presents in Of
01 Burns (jl/d) 7/11/00 3:23 pm Page 14
T HE P URL OINE D HE GE L 15
The latter world, on the other hand, is precisely that of language and of
words. Thus, Derrida attributes to Saussure the view that we can in fact com-
pletely divorce the signified from the signifier, thoughts and concepts from
the words which we use to express them.
The difficulty with all of this, however, is that Derrida’s argument is based
on a misreading, not only of the thought of Saussure but also of that of Hegel.
For example, when Saussure distinguishes between signified and signifier in
the Course he is not distinguishing between a pure thought or concept,
unconnected with a word, on the one hand, and the word which in a given
language is used to express this concept, on the other. In Saussure’s view,
words are definitely not just signifiers. In the Course Saussure explicitly
associates words, not with the linguistic signifier, but with the linguistic sign
(Saussure, 1974: 65–7, 104, 113–14). Words, for Saussure, are what Hegel
would refer to as concrete entities. It follows from this that when Saussure
distinguishes between the two component elements of the linguistic sign, the
signified and the signifier, he is not distinguishing between a pure concept, in
Derrida’s sense, and the word which is used to express it. He is, rather, dis-
tinguishing between the conceptual aspect of a particular word and its
acoustic or phonic aspect. Saussure is very well aware that there can be no
conceptual thought without the use of words. In fact, as we have seen, in the
Course in General Linguistics he explicitly rejects the view that there can be
thought without language, which Derrida erroneously attributes to him in
his Of Grammatology (Saussure, 1974: 65–6, 111–12). Indeed, it is quite
astonishing that Derrida should attribute the idea that the signifier and the
signified can be completely separated from one another to Saussure. For else-
where he explicitly acknowledges that for Saussure signifier and signified ‘are
distinguished simply as the two faces of one and the same leaf’ (Derrida,
1976b: 11).
It is a central aspect of the thinking of both Hegel and Saussure that con-
ceptual thought, and hence meaning, is not anterior to the linguistic signs
which are used to express or convey it. Like the good Hegelian which he is,
Saussure considers the signified or the thought to be a component element of
the sign or the word. The sign itself is a totality or whole which is prior to, and
has priority over, either one of its two component elements. Neither of these
components can be properly grasped or understood in isolation from the other.
Each must be considered in its relation to the other, and hence to the whole of
which they are both parts. For Saussure, then, it is not the signified or thought,
which is the abstract entity, that comes first. It is, rather, the linguistic sign or
the word, the concrete object of language. In Saussure’s view, there could not
be any conceptual thought at all unless, first, there was language (langage) and
hence also, of course, words. From the standpoint of a Hegelian interpretation
of Saussure, Derrida’s reading completely reverses what Saussure has to say
about this question in his Course in General Linguistics.
01 Burns (jl/d) 7/11/00 3:23 pm Page 16
T HE P URL OINE D HE GE L 17
of the sensible’ world of material existence ‘here below’, would most cer-
tainly be an anathema. Needless to say, it does not follow from this that our
earlier interpretation of Hegel as a philosophical idealist is incorrect. All that
is implied here is that, while remaining committed to philosophical idealism,
nevertheless Hegel follows Aristotle in rejecting the standpoint of Platonism.
Hegel’s idealism is an immanent and not a transcendent idealism.
Derrida himself, of course, is hostile towards any dualist metaphysics of
the sort advocated by Plato or Kant. In this connection, he makes an
extremely interesting analogy between Saussurean linguistics and Kantian
philosophy. He suggests that the distinction which Saussure makes between
the signified and the signifier, or (as Derrida would have it) between concepts
and words, is analogous to the distinction which Kant makes between the
world of noumena and that of phenomena. Saussure’s signified, the concept,
is the linguistic equivalent, Derrida suggests, of the Kantian noumenon or
thing-in-itself. The signifier or the word, on the other hand, is the linguistic
equivalent of Kant’s phenomenon. In the case of Saussure and linguistics,
however, as in the case of Kant and philosophy generally, there is no possi-
bility, Derrida alleges, of our ever being able to get at the pure concept as it
is in-itself. We can only ever apprehend this concept as it is presented to us
in and through language or words. It is in fact, Derrida insists, ‘impossible to
separate’ the ‘signified from the signifier’ (Derrida, 1976d: 159).
In this respect, then, Derrida is (at least implicitly) sympathetic towards
Hegel’s firm rejection of any dualist metaphysical presuppositions of a
Kantian sort.16 Derrida would, one suspects, entirely agree with Hegel’s
claim that Kantianism in philosophy must inevitably place an ‘impassable
gulf’ between the realm of reality and that of appearance (Hegel, 1975a:
34–6, 67, 70, 73). The difference between Derrida and Hegel, however, is
that Derrida does not criticize Kantian metaphysics in order to replace it
with a different (immanent) metaphysics which is claimed to be superior to
that of Kant precisely because it is not subject to objections of the sort
which Hegel raises when discussing Kant’s philosophy – objections which
(in so far as they have an application to linguistics) Derrida himself erro-
neously brings against Saussure. Rather, Derrida considers the inadequacies
of Kantianism to be a sufficient reason for rejecting metaphysics altogether,
both in philosophy and in linguistics. Consequently, he suggests that, as in
philosophy generally, so also in linguistics we should completely abandon
the distinction between the thing-in-itself and its phenomenal appearance,
or between the signified and signifier, as (according to Derrida) Saussure
understands it.
Derrida expresses this point by claiming that there simply is no linguistic
equivalent of the Kantian thing-in-itself, a pure concept which in some sense
lies behind, and can be conceived of separately from, the linguistic signs or
words which are used to express it. All that there is, in fact, is the sign. As he
01 Burns (jl/d) 7/11/00 3:23 pm Page 18
T HE P URL OINE D HE GE L 19
would again entirely agree with Nietzsche that ‘the “apparent” world is the
only one’ (Nietzsche, 1972: 36).
The problem with all of this, though, is that it makes the thought of Hegel
and Saussure, both with respect to philosophy generally and to questions of
linguistics in particular, much more inconsistent than it really is. Derrida mis-
represents both Hegel and Saussure by locating their thought against the
background of the Platonic (transcendent) rather than the Aristotelian
(immanent) tradition of metaphysics. The inevitable tendency of such a
reading is to attribute to Hegel and Saussure the view that we can separate
those things which, when considered from the Aristotelian, that is to say, the
authentically Hegelian standpoint, cannot actually be separated at all. It is to
read into Hegel and Saussure a logocentrism which is not actually there. If
Hegel and Saussure are read in a different way, from the standpoint of the
Aristotelian tradition, then it is evident that this central criticism which
Derrida makes of them is not at all well founded.
CONCLUSION
NOTES
1 The quotation is from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘The Purloined Letter’. See
Poe (1975: 345) and also n. 10 below.
2 Hegel’s views on semiology are to be found, above all, in his Philosophy of Mind
(Hegel, 1971: 210–18) and also the Lectures on Aesthetics (Hegel, 1975b: 303–13,
357–61, 402–20). For a discussion of Hegel’s views see Chaffin (1989); De Man
(1982); and Donougho (1982).
3 For Derrida’s reading of Hegel’s views on the sign see also Chaffin (1989); Cutro-
fello (1991); Llewelyn (1986b: 1–15); and Norris (1987b: 69–77).
4 For Hegel’s use of the term ‘individual’ see Hegel (1975a: 226–7).
5 For Hegel’s use of the term ‘concrete’ see Hegel (1975a: 19-20, 62, 113, 115, 174).
For his use of the term ‘actuality’ see Hegel (1975a: 8–10, 200–2).
6 For Hegel’s use of the terms ‘essence’ and ‘appearance’ see Hegel (1975a: 186–8).
7 For further discussion of Hegel’s idealism, in connection with the traditional
philosophical problem of universals, see Burns, 1998b. The (in my opinion)
01 Burns (jl/d) 7/11/00 3:23 pm Page 21
T HE P URL OINE D HE GE L 21
BIBLIOGRAPHY
T HE P URL OINE D HE GE L 23
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE