If there is one thing that Saussure’s revolution in linguistic thinking taught us it is that all semantic meaning is relational, that is, that words or terms seldom have a fixed meaning. Rather, they ...

In grad school, back in the postmodernism-soaked ’90s, floating signifiers had a moment. The idea behind a floating signifier is that it’s a reference that has broken free of its referent and taken on ...

Claude Levi-Strauss used “floating signifier” to refer to terms with meaning only in a given cultural context. Derrida of course would argue that all words are floating signifiers. I’m not sure what ...