17.

Zoom out. Ferdinand de Saussure claims that, despite his own dubiety about its atomic status, the word (as a value) resembles the minimal element of writing — what he calls “the linguistic unit” ²¹ (i.e., “something central in the mechanism of language” ²²). Saussure suggests that, even though the “concrete entities” ²³ of language might prove difficult to delimit, what he calls the “word-unit” ²⁴ seems, nevertheless, to serve as the most convenient touchstone for the “signifier” of the “signified” in writing. The word, for him, offers itself easily as the most standard currency of exchange within language, since the word behaves much like “a one-franc piece,” ²⁵ insofar as every given word denotes a value with respect to the value of every other word. The word, for him, thus functions as a kind of coin in a system of differences, all in reciprocal opposition to each other.