Excursus II - Saussure and the Structuralist Idea of Language as a System of Differences

Summary

Dante’s unitary vision, for all its immediacy, is a vision of mediation through language and its constitutive binaries. This is demonstrated in terms of Saussurian linguistics, but the principle had been anticipated with sophistication by the semiological and language-theoretical consciousness of the Middle Ages in ways that Dante particularly develops and foregrounds. Moreover, the post-structuralist turn in which meaning is generated no longer just internally to the system of language by diacritical difference but depends on relation to an Other outside the system is also eminently embodied in Dante’s theological understanding of language. Only relation to the absolute Other of divinity can lend language its meaningfulness. Every system must relate to other systems in order to have any meaning at all, and this is structurally equivalent to referring all meaning to God.