We are going to attempt to think about language as the medium through which life forms chose to connect to existence. A tad radical! And you're correct the Blue Green Algae doesn't speak English or Aramaic, so our question will be "What is called language?"
We have talked about de Sausurre and Jaques Derrida.We spent time with the Signifier, the word or sound cat, and the Signified, the mental image and connections that come into the mind of a small, fury, sometimes purring animal when cat is mentioned. And while we might never have found out how to pronounce the name de Sausurre we have admired his two points about the relationship between the Signifier and the Signified. Those points are, there is no reason why the word cat should mean a small, fury, sometimes purring animal, rather, over the years we have just collectively agreed upon it. The other point is the a word has meaning, not because of what it is, but because of what it is not. A cat is not a car or a kipper. De Sausurre pictured language as a massive shifting net that kept words apart.
Jacques Derrida, who had amazing hair and the ill-tempered expression of a man who might have spent too much time thinking, had, like so many, searched through the texts of preceding centuries looking for what Derrida, having absorbed de Sausurre, decided to call a Transcendental Signified. Where was the floor, what was the thing itself. Derrida asked: "where is an ultimate, unshakeable bedrock of truth outside of language that anchors everything else." In another way, "When you look up a word in a dictionary, it defines that word using other words. If you look up those words, they lead to more words. You are trapped in an endless loop of signifiers. You never actually reach the physical "thing" itself."
And if I remember we then looked at Derrida's suggestion for a possible solution to the where is the floor question? He chose the French word Différance which is arrived at from the word différer which means both "to differ from" and "postpone." He suggested meaning was always both differing and postponing. Here it's useful to accept that within the meaning of postpone is the idea of deliberate and deliberate implies a decision.
Derrida and Sausrre's contributions to understanding is to advance the idea that meaning is a collective human project. Me, I'd argue a Transcendental Signified is existence. If so this collective human project is our response to existence. Différance which as different and postponed is a fundamental constituent of the universe.
