2 - The Heritage of the CLG: Saussure, saussureanisms, structuralisms

Organizer: CHRISTIAN PUECH, Département de Littérature et Linguistique Françaises et Latines, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3, UMR HTL, Labex EFL.

DESCRIPTION OF THE SESSION

What does linguistics owe to the publication of the Course in General Linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure? Does the impertinence of the question stem from our not knowing the answer, or that it is for the most part blatantly obvious? This session, focused on the Course, is aimed at producing an inventory that can be oriented in several directions:

1) The evaluation of the (astonishing) career of this text of which Ferdinand de Saussure is neither the author nor the non-author demands our constantly renewed attention. Sometimes embalmed in the Museum of Linguistic Antiquities, sometimes monumentalized for the purposes of present-day legitimation, sometimes recapitalized with new problems following the (re)discovery of documents of all sorts (manuscripts, students’ notes, etc…), sometimes turned into heritage or, the reverse, denounced as “outmoded”, but most often ignored today by “linguistics in the making”, the CLG has all the characteristics of a dysfunctional heritage, or of a “semiological object”.  Can we in 2016, a century on, apply to it the dichotomy of the “sanctioned” and the “sidelined”? Regarding which of its aspects and objects?

2) Concerning semiological objects, Saussure said rightly that they exist only through circulation and transmission and that they therefore exist almost exclusively because they have existed. If we bear in mind that the representation we have of the Course today depends largely on the retrospectively “constructed reference” of the three principal Schools of linguistic structuralism (Prague, Copenhagen, New York), it becomes apparent, despite the efforts of researchers/editors such as Tullio De Mauro, Rudolf Engler and many others currently at work that we do not yet entirely know how to re-place the CLG in the context of its time. To what extent does the recent, renewed historiography of linguistic structuralisms allow us to modify the image constructed in the 1950s and 1960s?

3) There are at least two ways of considering the genealogy of Saussurean thought. Reading Saussure’s manuscripts, comparison with the Course in General Linguistics, the indispensable attempts to restore the full itinerary of Saussure (in particular John Joseph, 2012) make it possible to sketch what could be a genealogy of his thought up through his final courses (see Session 11). But “genealogy” can also be understood as the long process of the formation of Saussurean thought in the history of linguistic ideas. In this latter case, we are dealing with the itinerary of a “dispossessed” thinking. Whether one considers the text as a “forgery”, as a “vulgate” or an “apocrypha”… the Course in General Linguistics is the key text for most of the currents of 20^th-century linguistics. Actively (in the structuralisms, but also in Gustave Guillaume or Émile Benveniste) or reactively (in generativism, sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics…), the Course in General Linguistics constitutes a major landmark in the contemporary history of linguistic ideas (and of ideas generally…). How can we today evaluate the presence/absence of the Course in General Linguistics on the horizon of retrospection of the most current trends in linguistics? Assimilation ? Outmodedness? Opposition? Ignorance?

Contributions in this session corresponded to any of the following themes:

1. System and structure in Saussure, in the CLG, in his contemporaries and those who have followed in his wake
2. The CLG and European linguistics (Paris, Geneva, Moscow, Prague, etc.)
3. The CLG and linguistics beyond Europe
4. What does it mean to be anti-Saussurean? Non-Saussurean? Yesterday? Today?
5. The CLG, linguistic structuralisms and post-structuralisms
6. The CLG and philosophies of language

PLENARY SPEAKERS

Sylvain Auroux (Directeur de Recherche émérite, UMR CNRS HTL, Labex EFL) : Que peut dire un historien des sciences sur Saussure ?

Jürgen Trabant (Professeur, Université de Brême), Page web : http://juergen-trabant.de/

Selected papers for parallel sessions