that the sound “cat” is different from “cot” or “cut” and must
be audibly distinct from both in order to mean what it does.
More interesting, it is also true on the level of the signified. The
concept “cat” only has meaning because it is different from the
concept “lion,” and different as well from the concept “dog.”
These differences, argued Saussure, can be understood as op-
positions. A cat is “a domestic, rather than a wild, feline” (not
a lion or a tiger); it is “the other main domestic animal, the one
that does not bark or, generally, fetch” (not a dog). Signs are
not individual units, picked out and matched to particular ob-
jects. Instead, they signify as halves of an opposition, members
of a system. Signs signify structurally.
According to Saussure, a signifying system shapes the
world. Reality is not a heap of referents, objects that exist prior
to being named or described. The things that surround us,
from cats and dogs and chairs and cars to ideas, nations, and
families, are organized by signs. These signs help the things
come into being. This much, the idea that signifying con-
structs the world, Derrida praises in Saussure. But he has other
problems with Saussure’s project. Derrida complains that
Saussure shares the age-old logocentric prejudice against
writing and in favor of speech. “Plato said basically the same
thing” as Saussure, Derrida remarks, rather grumpily. For
Saussure, Derrida judges, writing is “a garment of perversion
and debauchery” ( 35 ).
As often, Derrida’s brilliant rhetorical fervor runs away
with itself here. Saussure did not say that writing is debauched
and perverted, merely that conversational usage, not books,
should be the prime resource for linguistic research. Saussure
effectively combated philology’s preference for staid scholarly
investigation. Instead, he championed fieldwork as a necessary
excursion into the messy arena of human talk and interaction.
Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology 79