5.2.2 Derrida and Ferdinand de Saussure

    Another important place to approach Derrida’s works is Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1857-1913) Course in General Linguistics. Saussure made an influential distinction between the signifier (the sound image of a word) and signified ( or the concept or meaning) and that the relationship between them is arbitrary, that is, there is no inner relationship,  say between the word ‘ sister’ and the person it signifies. The relation between the signifier and the signified is merely conventional and that convention can be considered as a ‘code’, which combines the signifier and the signified to make, the linguistic sign. It also implies that the signifier does not naturally lead to the entities in the world beyond the linguistic system but stays within it by pointing to other signifier. Derrida notes that the signifier does lead to some universal and stable entity or fixed and universal meaning (transcendental signified) but only to another signifier- just as what we consider as what we consider as ‘meaning’ in the dictionary are actually other words which have meanings of their own. As Derrida demonstrates the arbitrariness of the sign results in indefinite ‘deferral’ or postponement or the delay of reaching this ‘ultimate and absolute’ meaning beyond language. It is in this context one has to see his famous statements which appears in an essay on Rousseau in his book Of Grammatology (1967) that "there is nothing outside the text" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte).

    Another important point that Saussure makes is that ‘in language there are only differences without positive terms”, that is, we can recognize and understand one linguistic item – say the phoneme ‘p- only by contrasting it with everything that is ‘not-p’. Saussure goes on to say, “The entire mechanism of language, with which we shall be concerned later, is based on oppositions of this kind (e.g. between the word ‘father’ and ‘mother’) and on the phonic and conceptual differences that they imply.” Derrida shows that the same applies to the language of philosophy and the entire mechanism of this language is based on binary oppositions like ‘light’ vs. ‘dark’,  ‘ male’ vs. ‘female’, ‘good’ vs. ‘bad’, ‘speech’ vs. ‘writing’ ,‘nature’ vs. culture’ and so on. However, Derrida points out that these oppositions are not equal but hierarchic where the second term is considered either derivative or inferior to the first, the privileged one. What allows this inequality and hierarchy, according to Derrida is the tendency in the western thought to privilege ‘presence’ over ‘absence’, which Heidegger had termed as ‘metaphysics of presence’.