Carlo Ginzburg, «Medals and Shells: On Morphology and History, Once Again», Critical Inquiry 45/2 (« Davidson and His Interlocutors »), Winter 2019, p. 380-395
DOI: doi.org/10.1086/700992
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The amazing analogy between Cuvier’s and Saussure’s approaches to, respectively, paleontology and linguistics has been pointed out by Guy Jucquois. Cuvier (Jucquois wrote) was familiar to Saussure’s intellectual environment, which included so many distinguished naturalists.30 But a more analytic demonstration can be provided, focusing on Adolphe Pictet, a polymath from Geneva who was very close to the Saussure family. Both the title and the subtitle of Pictet’s book are telling: Les origines indo-européennes ou les Aryas primitifs: Essai de paléontologie linguistique (1859–63).31 Pictet’s contemporaries did not miss the Cuvierian overtones of a “linguistics paleontology” that tried to use words as fossils, aiming to resurrect the environment—natural, cultural and social—in which the original Indo-European population, the Aryans, lived and worked.32 Saussure, who was prodigiously precocious, read Pictet’s book when he was not yet fourteen. Deeply impressed, the young boy wrote an essay on Indo-European vocalism that he submitted to Pictet. Retrospectively, Saussure dismissed his early attempt as “childish.”33 But the three articles dedicated to the second edition of Pictet’s book, which Saussure published in the Journal de Genève in 1878 (he was then twenty-three), deserve to be taken seriously. They are usually ignored by the Saussure scholarship, probably embarrassed by the protoracist aura surrounding Pictet’s figure. Needless to say, the word race had multiple meanings in the nineteenth century, exemplified by the distinction between linguistic and anthropological races put forward by Ernest Renan.34 But the identity between population and language was at the very heart of Pictet’s project. Relying upon the old antiquarian metaphor, he mentioned the possibility of using fossil words as medals, as a clue pointing to a lost external reality—thus subscribing to the core of Pictet’s project.
In his mature age, Saussure rejected all of this, starting from the identification between ethnic and linguistic phenomena. To define the relationship between them, he advanced the distantiating neologism “ethnisme” in his Cours de linguistique générale.35 But the Cours, starting from the notion of the arbitrariness of the sign, focused on language and its complexities.
This trajectory is well known, but it includes an episode that many Saussure scholars regarded as disturbing. I refer to the draft of a letter written in Saussure’s hand, between November and December 1894, at the beginning of the Dreyfus affair, and addressed to Edouard Drumond, the director of the anti-Semitic journal La libre parole. The draft (apparently the related letter was never published) had an explicit anti-Semitic tone, qualifying the Jews as “parasites” and “usurers,” and referring to a specific passage of Drumont’s best seller La France juive (1886) (quoted in S, p. 415).
It has been suggested (with no basis whatsoever) that Saussure wrote the draft under his father’s dictation (his father was a notorious racist). One might assume that Saussure was at that time still under the impact of Pictet’s intellectual commitment to “the ancient Aryans . . . [,] our first ancestors.”36 Four years later, in 1898, Saussure declared himself “Dreyfusiste convaincu” (a committed partisan of Dreyfus) (quoted in S, p. 416). But the anti-Semitic draft included a piece of information—Saussure’s familiarity with Drumont’s La france juive—which may be relevant for the history of linguistics. It has been noted that the dictum usually associated with Saussure—that language is a system in which everything is connected—does not appear in Saussure’s writings, either published or unpublished.37 It is actually a misreading of Antoine Meillet’s “phonétiques de chaque idiome forment un système où tout se tient,” which presumably echoes the lectures delivered by his teacher, Saussure, in 1881–91.38 At that time, as it has been noted, the expression “un système où tout se tient” was already a commonplace.39 But it may be interesting to note that the same expression can be found in two books by Drumont: La fin d’un monde: étude psychologique et sociale (1889) and La dernière bataille: Nouvelle étude psychologique et sociale (1890). In both cases, the context is anti-Semitic, although the latter passage corrects the former: “The Jews . . . have built up a system in which everything is connected [où tout se tient], that embraces the whole country”;40 “Unfortunately for the Jews, society is a complex organism in which everything is connected [où tout se tient].”41
Saussure may have picked up this formula, reworking it in a completely different—purely linguistic—context. But behind Saussure’s emphasis on synchrony one can detect a distant, distinct echo of Cuvier’s static morphology, punctuated by innumerable revolutions.
30 ↑ Guy Jucquois, “L’imaginaire en linguistique,” in Bono homini donum: Essays in Historical Linguistics, in Memory of J. Alexander Kerns, ed. Yoël L. Arbeitsmann and Allan R. Bomhard (Philadelphia, 1981), pp. 159–78, esp. p. 165. The importance of Cuvier’s work for comparative linguistics has been pointed out, in general terms, by Winfred P. Lehmann, Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics (New York 1993), p. 297. Cassirer regarded Cuvier as a forerunner of linguistic structuralism. For Cassirer’s quotation of Antoine Meillet’s remark on language as a system “où tout se tient,” see Cassirer, “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics,” pp. 107–108.
31 ↑ See Maurice Olender, Les Langues du paradis: Aryens et Sémites: un couple providential (Paris 1989), pp. 127–41. The list of books owned by Saussure, today at the Bibliothèque Universitaire de Genève, includes several works by Pictet, including two editions of Origines; see Daniele Gambarara, “La bibliothèque de Ferdinand de Saussure,” Bulletin du Musée d’Art et d’Histoire 20 (1976): 355.
32 ↑ See the letter addressed by the zoologist Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau to Pictet in Olender, Les langues du Paradis, p. 134 n. 17.
33 ↑ Quoted in John E. Joseph, Saussure (New York, 2012), p. 153; hereafter abbreviated S.
34 ↑ See Ernest Renan, Histoire générale et système comparé des langues Sémitiques (Paris, 1855).
35 ↑ Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (Paris, 1916).
36 ↑ Adolphe Pictet, Les origines indo-européennes, ou les Aryas Primitifs: Essai de paléontologie Linguistique (Paris, 1877), p. 380.
37 ↑ See E. F. K. Koerner, “Noch einmal on the History of Language as a ‘Système où tout se tient,” Cahiers Ferdinand Saussure 51 (1998): 203.
38 ↑ Antoine Meillet, “Les lois de langage,” Revue internationale de sociologie 1 (July–Aug. 1893), p. 318.
39 ↑ See Koerner, “Noch einmal on the History of Language as a ‘Système où tout se tient.’”
40 ↑ Edward Drumont, La fin d’un monde: étude psychologique et sociale (Paris, 1889), p. 79.
41 ↑ Drumont, La dernière bataille: Nouvelle étude psychologique et sociale (Paris, 1890), p. xvi.
Extrait de l’article, § 10, pp. 389-391
La confrontation de Carlo Ginzburg (1939-2026) avec Saussure ne commence pas avec cet article. Déjà dans « Spie. Radici di un paradigma indiziario » (1979 ; paru en fr. dans Le Débat 6/6, 1980, pp. 3-44, texte complet disponible sur cairn.info) Saussure est une absence parlante : la linguistique y figure comme la « notable exception » contre laquelle Ginzburg construit, par contraste, la généalogie du paradigme indiciaire. Toutes les oppositions qui structurent l’essai — individuel contre général, diachronique contre synchronique, signe motivé contre signe arbitraire — dessinent à contre-jour la silhouette théorique du modèle saussurien. Saussure n’y est jamais nommé, mais il est partout. « Medals and Shells » serait alors le moment où, quarante ans plus tard, Ginzburg finit par nommer le fantôme — et, du même geste, le soumet à sa propre méthode.
