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“Signifi er†and “Signifi edâ€: Reclaiming Saussure’s Legacy
This new edition of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics
(1916) restores the Saussure that generations of English readers
grew up on: Wade Baskin’s 1959 translation. In addition to
its inherent elegance, Baskin’s translation of the lectures Saussure
gave at the end of his life at the University of Geneva is
indispensable for a very particular reason, one that Roy Harris’s
1983 translation wholly obscures: the rendition of Saussure’s
terms “ signifi ant †and “ signifi é †( CLG 1972, 99) as “signifi erâ€
and “signifi ed†( CGL 1959, 67). These equivalent neologisms in
French and English embody precisely what is revolutionary
about Saussure’s thought and what is specifi c to it. Baskin’s
translation makes this revolution clear. Saussure presents the
solution to a problem in the history of ideas that stretches back
to Plato and that reached crisis proportions in the late nineteenth
century: the problem of reference. Most familiar as a
problem in poetics, it is a problem in all media, including the
life sciences, which is why Saussure reconceived the problem of
reference as one of signifi cation. Many false starts delayed Saussure’s
discovery until the end of his life, daunted as he was by
the numerous historical contexts in which he had to test his
ideas in order to ensure their durability. Traditionally cast as
the problem of mimesis—of language as imitating or representing
what it refers to—the problem of reference is put on an entirely
different footing by what Saussure eventually achieved.
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