Such an argument is indebted to the traditional Geistesgeschichte that the modern German historical social sciences have supposedly abandoned. Jelavich suggests that insights drawn from the linguistic turn could help German historians develop a more innovative approach to cultural history. Jelavich credits Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault with introducing historians to the linguistic turn. He then elegantly summarizes their most important theoretical contributions. Derrida treats language as an autonomous system of signs that structures meaning.
Linguistic signs bear no necessary relationship to extralinguistic objects.
Meaning derives rather from the relationships among signifiers in the linguistic system. Derrida thus rejects the notion of a transcendental signifier, such as God or the subject, that gives meaning to all others. Rather, the ego is constructed out of language. Derrida criticizes the hierarchical binary oppositions that arise our of linguistic systems, and his readings often involve a reversal of traditional hierarchies arising from binary oppositions. Our subjectivities thus dissolve into the linguistic system.