Strukturalisus. Saussure und die strukturalistische Episteme/ Structuralism. Saussure and the Structuralist Episteme
Nearly one century after the appearance of the Cours de linguistique générale the Swiss linguist and semiologist Ferdinand de Saussure is still considered as the ›revolutionary founder‹ of structuralism. Especially his role as ›author‹ of the Cours de linguistique générale contributed to this vision. The Cours was published three years after his death in 1916 and had a spectacular literary reception, probably making it the most quoted linguistic book of the twentieth century. The literary reception created an almost symbiotic relationship between the author-name ›Saussure‹ and an epistemologic movement in the cultural sciences and the humanities, which Roman Jakobson called ›Structuralism‹ for the first time in 1929. Interestingly enough Saussure did not write the book that made him famous. His authorship is a fiction of the literary reception, behind which one is forced to recognize that the ›structuralist‹ author ›Saussure‹ is an invention of the paradigm of which he is claimed to be the founder. At the same time - especially in the comprehensive and mostly fragmented texts by Saussure himself - a semiologic idea of language becomes visible that - in complete opposition to the fundamental convictions of structuralism - consideres ›language‹ in its historicity and sociality, as ›circulation‹ or ›game of signs‹, as ›use of signs‹.
Before this background the contributions of the conference attempt to focus on some of the central problems: (1) Which science-historical reasons lead to the fading of the structuralist founding myth and allow a new perspective on the ›historical‹ Saussure, who is the actual author of his writings? (2) Can the ›historical‹ Saussure be considered as a fundamental critic of structuralism-cognitivism, of which for a long time he has been considered the founder? (3) Does the ›historical‹ Saussure, whose semiologic language idea conceptualizes ›language as a dynamic figure‹, as a ›discursive-social‹ phenomenon, gain a new relevance for recent debates in the cultural sciences and humanities, for example in the fields of aesthetic theory or language and media theory? (4) Is it possible to observe the conditions of the ›invention‹ and constitution of scientific paradigms as well as the role of founding myths and founding narratives in the development history of new scientific orders on the basis of the ›case-study‹ of the ›Founder of Structuralism Saussure‹?
Prof. Dr. Ludwig Jäger / Prof. Dr. Andreas Kablitz
Universität zu Köln