Ferdinand de Saussure 1857 – 1913

Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist and semiotician whose posthumously assembled Course in General Linguistics (1916) became the foundational text of structural linguistics and, through it, of twentieth-century structuralism in anthropology, literary theory, and philosophy. After early work on Indo-European phonology that made his reputation as a young man, he taught for decades at Geneva, where his lectures on general linguistics were written down by students and edited after his death. His distinctions between langue and parole, signifier and signified, and synchrony and diachrony shaped the work of Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Lacan, and Derrida.