[decode]

That seems like a fun game, though I don't have any opinions on Continental Philosophy. I don't speak French well enough to do it in the original, so I'll have to try in translation:

"And even if one wished to keep sonority on the side of the sensible and contingent signifier which would be strictly speaking impossible, since formal identities isolated within a sensible mass are already idealities that are not purely sensible, it would have to be admitted that the immediate and privileged unity which founds significance and the acts of language is the articulated unity of sound and sense within the phonic."

Taken from here: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/f...

While reading it, I was honestly asking myself if there were major transcription errors from the original translation, because it's completely impenetrable.

[michael_dorfman]

That's not a terribly felicitous translation, but it is by no means impenetrable. Of course, we can't take that sentence in isolation-- it is the middle sentence of a short paragraph, so you need to read a bit of context, too.

The paragraph also presumes that you are familiar with the opposition (familiar since Kant, at least) between the sensible and the intelligible, and Saussure's division of the sign into a signifier (which is supposed to be sensible) and a signified (which is the intelligible portion of the sign, not the thing referred to.)

Now, if you have that context, and understand the background, the paragraph is perfectly understandable.

[shadowsun7]

Explain it to us.