From Ferdinand de Saussure's
Notebooks
Various concepts are present
in language (that is, clothed in linguistic form) such as beef,
lake,
sky,
red,
sad,
five,
to split, to see.
At what moment, and by virtue of what operation, what interplay between them, what conditions, do these concepts form discourse?
The sequence of these words, however enriched it might
be by the ideas it evokes, will
never
make any human being understand that another human being, by pronouncing
it, wishes to convey something
specific to him or her.
Language,
on
the other hand, only makes preliminary recognition of isolated
concepts which do not acquire the significance
of thought until links
have been established among them.What do we need to indicate that by using certain terms available to language we wish to signify a specific thing?. . . Discourse exists . . . in ways we do not understand, to assert a link between two concepts invested with linguistic form.
