essential truths. American Sign Language is presumably less
capable than speech of a range of intonations. Saussure would
have considered this a practical, not a metaphysical, disadvan-
tage. The voice is simply better equipped than the hands to
produce a variety of expressive nuances. Derrida reads Saus-
sure’s remark about speech as a statement of metaphysical
need, rather than what it is, a merely pragmatic judgment.
If Derrida were correct, one would expect Saussure to
embrace phonetic writing and reject nonphonetic systems
like Chinese, which are more distant from the human voice.
Instead, Saussure recognizes that Chinese does not represent
spoken words—and he applauds this fact. Saussure writes that
in Chinese, writing “does not have the annoying consequences
that it has in a phonetic system, for the substitution is absolute;
the same graphic symbol can stand for words from different
Chinese dialects” (Course 48 ). Saussure protests against the
confusion created for linguistic research by phonetic writing’s
often inaccurate or misleading effort to represent speech. He
does not see writing itself as the enemy.
In the same section of his Grammatology that deals
with Saussure, Derrida introduces C. S. Pierce, the eccentric
nineteenth-century Harvard professor who was one of the
founders of pragmatism. Pierce pioneered the study of signs:
in a way, he was the first semiotician. According to Derrida,
Pierce shows us that “from the moment there is meaning there
are nothing but signs.We think only in signs”(Grammatology
50 ). Experience is an unwieldy, even a mistaken concept ( 60 –
61 ). Instead, we should train ourselves to think in terms of—
and here Derrida pronounces a daring new word—the trace.
At times, Derrida writes about the trace in near-mystical
terms. The trace “does not exist”; but it is the basis for all exis-
tence ( 62 ). And again, in rapt italics: “The trace is in fact the ab-
solute origin of sense in general. Which amounts to saying once
Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology 83