The Madness of Words and the Enunciating Subject

What is it about?

In this chapter I contest the general post-Saussurean and Heideggerean notion that language signifies by itself, and that texts are active, while human beings dissolve into various impersonal linguistic systems. I argue that Saussurean linguistics is inadequate, and needs to be replaced by a model that recognizes the active nature of linguistic production and understanding. I suggest that de Man’s particular extrapolation from Saussure depends on an unwarranted and untenable slippage from the uncontested fact that the signifiers in any particular language are arbitrary, to the highly contestable notion that signification itself (the use of signs by specific language users in specific, conventional, pragmatic contexts) is the result of the arbitrary positing power of language itself. I also give a further example of the active role of the speaking subject, by considering the various ways in which writers can report and paraphrase the ideas of others, and show how de Man takes advantage of these linguistic mechanisms to rewrite Rousseau, Hegel and Nietzsche.

Featured Image