Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Taking the manuscript On the Dual Essence of Language as a starting point, the article follows the scholarly tradition of reexamining the position of Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistics regarding twentieth-century semiotics and structuralism. After half a century of research on Saussure's manuscript legacy, the manuscript discovered in 1996 and published for the first time in 2002 develops aspects of Saussure's linguistic thought that cannot be inferred on the basis of previously known texts. One of these aspects concerns the crucial question of the nature of the linguistic sign and the process of signification, as well as the role of linguistic science in understanding such problems. The current text aims at reconstructing Saussure's ideas on these points through an analysis of the notion of final quaternion, claiming that this notion presents an alternative concept of the linguistic sign and signification process that hasn't been explored so far. It involves a five-sided relationship of non-pregiven elements in one signifying complex that is neither signifier, nor signified, and in the end, brings to the fore the material dimension of verbal language.

At the core of this essay is an exploration of the notion of regime of relevance introduced by Galin Tihanov in his monograph The Birth and Death of Literary Theory (2019). On the one hand, the author traces the ramifications of Tihanov's coinage and demonstrates possible arenas for its further application; on the other, the essay researches the origins of the notion in Michel Foucault's formulation of regime of truth. After a brief account of the Bulgarian reception of Foucault's work, the text turns to Foucault's early monograph The Order of Things (1966) to explore the paths that link Tihanov's work to Foucault's and then compares a reconstructed version of Foucault's project for literary theory to Tihanov's project.