Speech and Phenomena notes 3: more on the inner monologue

I've had a few days off and have lost my bearings with this, hm, where was I?

Ok, yeah, I'd got to the part about inner monologue in Chapter 3. I see that at this point in my notes on the book I've written 'some complicated stuff which I'll skip'. Helpful.

Before I continue, there's one other thing I learned in the meantime. Last time I talked a bit about Garver's introduction to the book where he distinguishes between the 'logic' (fixed structural rules) and 'rhetoric' (contextual use) sides of language. After this I remembered that Saussure has this jargon, langue and parole, and every time I've looked up what they mean I've immediately forgotten it again because I had no use for the information. But it turns out that they basically refer to this split, with langue being the structural side and parole the contextual one. Wikipedia:

The French term langue ('[an individual] language') encompasses the abstract, systematic rules and conventions of a signifying system; it is independent of, and pre-exists, the individual user. It involves the principles of language, without which no meaningful utterance, or parole, would be possible.

In contrast, parole ('speech') refers to the concrete instances of the use of langue, including texts which provide the ordinary research material for linguistics.

I don't particularly care about Saussure per se, but he's an influence on Derrida, so it might be useful to have this clear in my head.

Right, I can't avoid banging my head against the next part of Chapter 3 any longer. I gave up somewhere around this point:

The reduction to the monologue is really a putting of empirical worldly existence between brackets. In "solitary mental life" we no longer use real (wirklich) words, but only imagined (vorgestellt) words. And lived experience—about which we were wondering whether it might not be "indicated" to the speaking subject by himself—does not have to be so indicated because it is immediately certain and present to itself...  The certitude of inner existence, Husserl thinks, has no need to be signified. It is immediately present to itself. It is living consciousness.

So I think Derrida is going to want to break up this idea of inner experience being completely present and lacking an indicative component.

There's a bunch of stuff about existence and nonexistence here. I think this is to do with the property of indicative signs that they must have a referent, i.e. there must be an existing thing that they actually indicate. Expressive signs don't have this limitation, you can imagine something that you're not perceiving in any way.

In the interior monologue, a word is thus only represented. It can occur in the imagination (Phantasie). We content ourselves with imagining the word, whose existence is thus neutralized. In this imagination, this imaginary representation (Phantasievorstellung) of the word, we no longer need the empirical occurrence of the word; we are indifferent to its existence or nonexistence.

So in Husserl's language, we've 'bracketed' the actual existence of the thing and are only concerned with our imagination of the thing, which according to Husserl is absolutely certain and self-present. This is the 'phenomenological reduction'.

There are a couple of loooong footnotes at this point which are probably important but also I can't be bothered. If I ignore that, I'm almost at the end of the chapter, except for a final short section about Saussure.

Saussure was also careful to distinguish between the real word and its image. He also saw the expressive value of a "signifier" only in the form of the "sound-image." "Signifier" means "sound-image." But, not taking the "phenomenological precaution, Saussure makes the sound-image, the signifier as "mental impression," into a reality whose sole originality is to be internal, which is only to shift the problem without resolving it.

Well I can't say I'm exactly clear on any of this yet, but I got a bit further. Will stop there for now.