substitution. Another myth tried to explain the vicissitudes of the moon by a periodic battle
whose protagonists were Horus and Seth. During the combat, Horus’ eye was wrenched out,
but Seth, finally
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vanquished, was obliged to return to his victorious opponent the eye that he had lifted;
according to another version, the eye returned on its own, or was brought back by Thoth.
Whatever the case might have been, Horus received his eye back joyfully, and put it back in
its place after purifying it. The Egyptians called that eye oudjat, ‘the healthy one.’ We shall
see that the oudjat eye played a considerable role in the funerary religion, in the Osirian
legend, and in the sacrificial ceremony. This legend .. . later received a solar counterpart: it
was said that the universal master, at the origin of the world, was seen, for some unknown
reason, to be without an eye. He charged Shou and Tefnout to bring it back. The absence of
the two messengers lasted so long that Rê was obliged to replace the unfaithful eye. The eye,
when it was brought back by Shou and Tefnout, became very angry (a), seeing that its place
had been taken. In appease-ment, Rè transformed it into the serpent-uraeus and placed it on
his forehead as the symbol of his power; furthermore, he charged it to defend him against his
enemies. (a) The eye shed tears (rémyt) from which men were born (rémet); the mythic origin
of men clearly rests upon a simple wordplay” (Jacques Vandier, La religion égyptienne, P.U.F.
[Paris, 1944], pp. 39–40). This myth of substitution can be related to the story of the eye in
Rousseau (cf. below, p. 212, 148-49).
32. »Linguistique et théorie de la communication, » (op. cit., pp. 87–88) [p. 245].
33.Cf. particularly « La trace de l’autre, » T idjschrif t voor filosofie (September 1963), and my
essay « Violence et métaphysique: Essai sur la pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas, »
L’écriture et la di f f érence.
34.I take the liberty of referring to a forthcoming essay, “Ousia et Grammè, note sur une note
de Sein and Zeit.”
35.Page 103 [p. 70]. See also everything concerning “homogeneous time,” (pp. 64 f.) [pp. 38
f.].
36.Op. cit., p. 106. Cf. also the Diogène article already cited.
37.
Mercure de France (February 1964) : 254. Presenting this text, Starobinski evokes the
musical model and concludes: “This reading is developed according to another tempo (and in
another time) ; at the very limit, one leaves the time of ‘consecutivity’ proper to habitual
language.” One could of course say “proper to the habitual concept” of time and of language.
38.I have chosen to demonstrate the necessity of this “deconstruction” by privileging the
Saussurian references, not only because Saussure still dominates contemporary linguistics and
semiology; it is also because he seems to me to hold himself at the limit: at the same time
within the metaphysics that must be deconstructed and beyond the concept of the sign
(signifier/signified) which he still uses. But Saussure’s scruples, his interminable hesitations,
particularly in the matter of the difference between the two “aspects” of the sign and in the
matter of “arbitrariness,” are better realized through reading Robert Codel’s Les sources
manuscrites du cours de linguistique générale ([Ge-neva], 1957) pp. 190 f. Suffice it to say
here that it is not impossible that the literality of the Course, to which we have indeed had to
refer, should one day appear very suspect in the light of unpublished material now being
prepared for publication. I am thinking particularly of the Anagrams [now published, see note
4]. Up to what point is Saussure responsible for the Course as it was edited and published
after his death? It is not a new question. Need we specify that, here at least, we cannot
consider it to be pertinent? Unless my project has been fundamentally misunderstood, it
should be clear by now that, caring very little about Ferdinand de Saussure’s very thought
itself, I have interested myself in a
text whose literality has played a well-known role since
1915, operating within a system of readings, influences, misunderstandings, borrowings,
refutations, etc. What I could read—and equally what I could not read—under the title of A
Course in General Linguistics seemed important to the point of excluding all hidden and
“true” intentions of Ferdinand de Saussure. If one were to discover that this text hid another
text—and there will never by anything but texts—and hid it in a determined sense, the reading
that I have just proposed would not be invalidated, at least for that particular reason. Quite the
contrary. Besides, at the very end of their first “Preface,” the editors of the Course themselves
foresee this situation.
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Part I: Chapter 3
1.On the empirical difficulties of a research into empirical origins, cf. M. Cohen, La grande
invention de l’écriture ([Paris], 1958), Book I, pp. 3 f. With
L’histoire de l’écriture, by J. G.
Février (1948—59), it is in France the most important work on the general history of writing.
Madeleine V.-David has studied them in Critique [157] (June 1960).
2.Madeleine V.-David proposes a particular explanation for it. “It is certain that, in nineteenth-
century thought, a gap is produced following the too exclusive apology for the facts of
language (begun by Herder) . Paradoxically, the century of the great decipherings made a
tabula rasa of the long preparation for those decipherings, by parad-ing the century’s
disaffection from the problem of signs. . . . Thus a gap remains to be filled, a continuity to be
reestablished. . . . One can do no better than to indicate .. . the Leibnizian texts which deal,
often conjointly, with the facts of Chinese and the projects for a universal writing, and the
multiple positions possible for writing and for the spoken. . . . But perhaps we do not suffer
only from the blindness of the nineteenth century with regard to signs. Undoubtedly the fact
that we are ‘alphabetic’ writers also conspires strongly in hiding from us such essential
aspects of the activity of writing” (Discussion, EP, pp. 352—53)
3.She has done it particularly in Les dieux et le destin en Babylonie (P.U.F., 1949) ; (cf.
especially the last chapter on “The Reign of Writing”) and in many articles in the Revue
philosophique, the
Bulletin de la société linguistique de Paris, in
Critique, in the
Journal de
psychologie and in the
Journal asiatique. Madeleine V.-David was the disciple and translator
of B. Hrozny.