Trabajo de la lengua / Trabajo de sentido: la lección de Alcira Saavedra sobre Ferdinand de Saussure

Abstract

The centenary of the publication of the Course in general linguistics embodies the complexity of a serious problem: the one of those that define or demonstrate the alteration of a state of things. Today, unlike any previous commemoration of the discovery of the Orangerie late last century, we must not lose sight of the importance of what another Saussure, not one just different under dissimilar interests or divergent formulations in relation to the textus receptus’ Course, compels us to know his lesson on “general linguistics”. This other Saussure, to whom it would not be unconscionable to introduce as a “Saussure other”, appeared with special fruitfulness in the lessons of a Colombian professor, Alcira Saavedra Becerra, who placed him as the foundation of a radical exploration: the one of the work of meaning, the one of what should be shown to thought as own work, even against their own resistances, refusals, recoveries or forclusions. Thought should know that what it knows is knowledge of language and that this knowledge, even without knowing it (even avoiding it as knowing or even without formulating it as knowing of something), is a condition of any of its possibles. From a “lectio saussureana” that appears, despite the philological advances that support its studies today, irreducible to the purity of a doctrine (i.e. strange to the stability of what was said by the teacher), this article seeks to expose another lesson: the one in which some other “saussures” ―the Saussure of the work of meaning, in the first place― saw the light in Colombia, thanks to the teaching of Alcira Saavedra B.