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The first chapter of the book focuses on the concluding section of Agamben's 1977 book Stanzas, where he launches his first sustained critique of deconstruction with an interpretation of Saussure that responds in close fashion to Derrida's famous reading in Of Grammatology. In response to this foundational text of deconstruction, Agamben offers a counter-portrait of the Swiss linguist and a counter-reading of his revolutionary work in the Course in General Linguistics. In viewing Saussure not as the founder of semiology but rather as a linguist who sought but failed to escape the double and differential logic of the sign, this interpretation not only suggests a compelling alternative to the way Saussure has been taken up within the structuralist and poststructuralist tradition, but also serves as the basis for the view of language (language considered as the potentiality for language) that will underlie Agamben's subsequent philosophical work to the present.

This chapter discusses the way Katherine Mansfield uses the French language in her short-stories, and specifically in the stories set in France. Mansfield does not only use the French language as a semiological tool but confronts English-speaking readers with a foreign language that constantly interacts with their mother-tongue, imposing on them the Other’s tongue – Derrida’s ‘monolingualism of the Other’. She opens up an in-between space in which the two languages are questioned and unsettled, a process echoing the ‘becoming-other of language’ described by Deleuze. This chapter examines how the tension between English and French reaches a climax in the schizophrenic process at work in ‘Je ne Parle pas français’; language becomes, between the English and the French characters, a ‘cannibal-language’, the aggressive appropriation of the Other through his/her language in order to leave him/her speechless and powerless.

This chapter reads the asymmetrical chiasmus between the ‘rhetorization of grammar’ and the ‘grammatization of rhetoric’ that structures the argument of de Man's ‘Semiology and Rhetoric’. It demonstrates that a certain materialism can be drawn out of a text putatively only about linguistic structures.

This chapter discusses the semiological and epistemological status of Helmholtz’s curve recordings. It argues that these curves did not provide precision measurements of time but instead illustrated the basic structure of Helmholtz’s time experiments. The parallel traces that Helmholtz obtained by means of his myograph highlight the fact that two successive trials were carried out that differed in only one respect, i.e. the position of the electrode on the nerve. In other words, the curves are not representations in the common sense but rather indexical signs of a research machine. In other words, similar as in Proust’s work, the unity of Helmholtz’s time experiments is provided by an apprenticeship aiming at deciphering signs and their changes over time.

After having completed some sociological and anthropological field work in Abidjan (Ivory Coast), Latour went to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. Between 1975 and 1977, he investigated the “production of scientific facts” in the neuroendocrinological department of Roger Guillemin. This chapter shows that Latour’s approach to scientific practice was shaped in important ways by his early interest in Bultmann and Biblical exegesis.

This chapter aims at clarifying some fundamental concepts of Bruno Latour’s philosophical sociology. It shows that the concept of “actor,” or “actant,” was derived from the semiology of Algirdas Julien Greimas. In addition, it depicts Latour’s gradual shift from the semiological to a pragmatist notion of “actors.” This shift occurs in Latour’s dialogue with Michel Serres and Isabelle Stengers that he increasingly engages in in the late 1980s.