The Phenomenological Legacy: Speaking Subjects

Abstract

The dominant structuralist and post-structuralist legacy of the Course in General Linguistics imposed an understanding of Saussure’s linguistics as a chiefly system-based approach where speech is a secondary and derivate fact. If language operates as a relatively autonomous system of rules and relations, we can dispense with invoking the daily activity of expression and communication. Language is primarily an object that does not need speaking subjects. This concluding chapter tracks an alternative legacy of Saussure’s linguistics in contemporary philosophy that agrees with his stated emphasis on speech practice and language change. This interpretation is found in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Specifically, Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of the Course as a “synchronic linguistics of speech” is congruent with Saussure’s definition of language as a phenomenon contingent on the activity of speaking subjects in the Nachlass. Ultimately, subject- and structure-based approaches to cultural signification can be integrated, and the perceived antagonism between phenomenology and structuralism (and post-structuralism) softened.