Professor Jean Starobinski is a scholar of singular quality. I know of no other person who is a Doctor of Medicine, a man of letters, a linguist and a profound writer on the sociology of art. His escalating spread of knowledge and scholarship is matched only by his willfulness not to become a cult figure, even though he himself specializes in the interpretation of cult-figures, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Jean Starobinski, among his other professorial appointments, holds the permanent one on the Faculte des Lettres, University of Geneva. It was to be expected that Professor Starobinski would one day address himself to the question of language, discourse and semantics. And who else could be more worthy of his impeccable and lucid erudition than Ferdinand de Saussure, the acknowledged 'father' of the modern science of