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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
This chapter attempts to expound Levinas's philosophy of language by seeking to 'explain the reference made in the final crowded sentence of Otherwise than Being to
the trace - the unpronouncable writing - of what, always already past - always 'il', Pro-noun, does not enter into any present, to which names designating beings or verbs in which their essence resounds are no longer suited - but which marks with its seal everything that can be named. [ob 185]
I begin by giving brief accounts of two of the philosophies of language that dominated the intellectual scene when Levinas's main works were being composed.
STRUCTURALISM
The cluster of ideas that goes under the name structuralism derives largely from Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, though, as Levinas reminds us, structuralism is anticipated by the philosophical ideal of a mathesis universalis proposed by Descartes and Leibniz (ob 96). While nineteenth-century theoreticians had focused mainly on the evolution of language, Saussure projects a science that subordinates the diachronic to the synchronic. Distinguishing acts of speech (parole) from language regarded as a system (langue), he aims to show how the units assembled in a linguistic system signify not ‘positively’ by standing independently for objects signified, but ‘negatively’ through the combinatorial differences between them.
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