Per una semiologia materialista e dialettica: Trần Đức Thảo critico di Saussure

Trần Đức Thảo was a specialist of phenomenology familiar with the French exi-
stentialists, a Marxist and an anti-colonial activist. He devoted much of his effort
to describing the ontogenetic and phylogenetic origins of consciousness and lan-
guage. In this vein, he proposed a general semiology that could enable him to de-
scribe all the stages of the development of human symbolic abilities. In this paper,
we study the theoretical issues involved in Thảo’s criticism of the semiotic model
proposed in Saussure’s Cours de Linguistique Générale and more generally of the
structuralist readings of the Cours. In the last part, we introduce Thảo’s notion of
a “language of the real life”.