The Terror of Ferdinand de Saussure

From
Ferdinand de Saussure's
Notebooks

torn page

torn page:
absolutely incomprehensible if I were not forced to confess that I suffer from a morbid horror of the pen, and that this work is for me an experience of sheer torture, quite out of proportion to its relative unimportance.

In the case of linguistics, the torture is increased for me by the fact that the more simple and obvious a theory may be, the more difficult it is to express it simply, because I state as a fact that there is not one single term in this particular science which has ever been based on a simple idea, and that this being so, one is tempted five or six times between the beginning and the end of a sentence to rewrite.

o"""one is tempted five or six times between the beginning and the end of a sentence to rewrite."

Between 1907 and 1911 Ferdinand de Saussure wrote the lecture notes that would posthumously become Course in General Linguistics through the editorial diligence of de Saussure's graduate students. But between 1906 and 1909 de Saussure filled over 100 notebooks with his studies of anagrams he perceived hidden within classical poetry, anagrams he considered the generative principle of the poetry itself. Saussure never attempted to publish these writings, and in fact these notebooks were not discovereduntil the 1970s. There are other interesting fragments there, including fragmentary notes from what appears to have been a very intensive study of the Nibelungenlied.The fragments I include here can be found in Jean Starobinski, Words upon Words . trans. Olive Emmett (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979)

Terrors of	Promises of

linguistics	the sign