GASPAROV, BORIS. Beyond Pure Reason. Ferdinand de Saussure’s Philosophy of Language and Its Early Romantic Antecedents. New York : Columbia University Press, 2013. 248 pp.

The academic Saussure industry – for that is what it has nowadays become – continues to flourish. It rivals both the Marx industry and Freud industry. Translations and commentaries follow one another in rapid succession. Interpretations of its central figure proliferate accordingly. The latest, a Romantic Saussure, is conjured up by Boris Gasparov in the book reviewed here. Gasparov is a professor of Russian who emigrated from Estonia to the United States in 1981. He proposes for our consideration a Saussure whose thinking about language and the human condition is rooted in “the thousands of semi-improvised fragments written by Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel in the period between 1795 and 1801” (11). Many will find this new approach to Saussure’s intellectual ancestry both surprising and difficult to accept. For Gasparov, Saussure’s Romanticism resides in his failure to resolve – even his indifference to – the theoritical contradictions that lurk behind his most famous pronouncements. These include the celebrated dichotomies between langue and parole, and between synchrony and diachrony. But this is not all : But where is the evidence of Saussure’s ‘identification’ with any ‘new physics’ or ‘new chemistry’? One looks in vain for even a mention of electrolyte solutions or periodic tables (first proposed by Mendeleev in 1869) in the Saussurean corpus. Worse still, where is the‘scornful rejection’ of the Neogrammarians? On the contrary, the Introduction to the Cours praises the Neogrammarians for having placed ‘all the results of comparative philology in a historical perspective, so that linguistic facts were connected in their natural sequence’ (Cours : 18-19). It would be perverse either to ignore this praise, or to read into it anything other than Saussure’s due acknowledgment of the debt that linguistics owed to the work of Brugmann, Osthoff, Paul and their colleagues. In the same passage in the Cours, the approach of the Neogrammarians is contrasted with what might well be called the‘Romantic’ view of a language, i.e. as ‘an organism developing of its own accord’ (Cours : 19). Further praise for the Neogrammarians is given in Cours 223, where they are credited with being the first to recognize the role of analogy (sa vraie place) in linguistic change. Thus Saussure’s ‘scorn’ for the achievements of the Neogrammarians turns out to be a figment of Gasparov’s imagination. Any temptation to scour the pages of the early Romantics for proto-Saussurean ideas diminishes accordingly. It might be said in defence of Gasparov, however, that particularly in the First Course Saussure seems inclined to treat la langue as an organism with an analysis sui generis, which sets the standard by which all other analyses are to be judged. He told his students : The ‘Romantic’ assumption here seems to be that all speakers of a given language automatically make the same assumptions about its analysis. In other words, we are back with one of the twin fallacies constitutive of the traditional language myth. According to Gasparov, ‘radical negativity’ is the fundamental feature of Saussure’s thinking. The above passage is evidently intended as a rebuttal of Saussure’s claim (Cours : 155) that “in itself thought is like a swirling cloud, where no shape is intrinsically determinate. No ideas are established in advance, and nothing is distinct, before the introduction of la langue”. In order to evaluate either the claim or the rebuttal, it would be necessary to have a clear example of ‘thought prior to the sign’. But none is proposed. Nor is it evident where such an example could come from. So in effect we are invited first to settle the abstract …