Saussure (among other things)

The first part of this post might come off a little bit naively “if we could only learn to love one other, the world would be a much better place,” but, alas, I guess that is the risk I am running.
So, I was re-reading Saussure in order to start catching up on the blog, and, it struck me that at least a few of the theorists we have read emphasize difference. For Saussure, all of language is based on difference—you can only truly know the full meaning of one word in its differences from another word. “Synonyms like French redouter ‘dread,’ craindre ‘fear,’ and avoir peur ‘be afraid’ have value only through their opposition: if redouter did not exist, all its content would go to its competitors” (969). Some feminists also strive to emphasize the differences between men and women, to make, as Kristeva puts it, “a necessary identification between the two sexes as the only and unique means for liberating the ‘second sex’” (21) (sort of, it seemed to me, to not make women the new men, but to make women the new women). And Levinas seemed to praise literature for its ability to allow us to respect the view of the Other without trying to subvert it into the I. Difference, for all of them, seems to be good, to be inevitable. It is a functional part of life that may as well (or, in Saussure’s case, that cannot help but) be embraced.
Another, really unrelated thing that I thought when reading Saussure—this is what makes it so difficult to learn another language. It’s hard to master all the intricacies of a system, which, to him, is what language is. It takes a long time to master this even the first time, so when you add having to constantly try to translate things and understand another language through your own language, suddenly things get very difficult. I have taken French for many years, and, recently, the goal of fluency only seems harder to reach. If language were not a system, maybe I could accomplish it; if all I had to do was just memorize a long list of single, isolated words, I might have it made, but, instead, it seems that, at best, what I will have is the ability to use pre-programmed sentences that cover basic situations. I could never be myself in French because I do not think that I will be able to master a whole other system, to get to the point where I do not have to mediate their language through my own system.