In the nineteenth century, philologists built fortresses of dusty,
antique books, immuring themselves in the library. Saussure
protested this Casaubonesque ignorance of, and disdain for,
the study of living conversation. (Similarly, in sociology,
Erving Goffman and others provided an alternative to a dull,
statistic-ridden discipline by arming themselves with a note-
book and snooping around barrooms, hair salons, and gas
stations.) Such empirical testing is, for Derrida, a dangerous
temptation: by lending metaphysical assertion the status of
palpable reality, it seduces us away from the suspicion we
should foster toward metaphysics.
Derrida, in his discussion of Saussure, claims that the an-
cient philosophical and religious distinction between the soul
and the body is “borrowed” from the contrast between speech
and writing, which he insists is primary ( 35 ). Derrida wants to
associate empirical realism, based on the fact of the body, with
voice. This point seems rather dubious; in any case, it would be
difficult to demonstrate. Derrida provides no evidence for his
idea that the speech-writing difference precedes everything
else. In addition, he asserts that the sign and religion appear at
the same time in world history: “The sign and divinity have the
same place and time of birth” ( 35 ). One longs for some expla-
nation of such far-reaching insistence (and for possible evi-
dence taken from studies of the origin of religion), but it is
not forthcoming. Derrida offers no details about the close re-
lation between the sign and godhead. At such moments, he
assumes a high, unsubstantiating preacher’s tone, borrowed
from avant-garde polemic.
Derrida objects in no uncertain terms to Saussure’s dis-
tinction between the signifier and the signified. Saussure al-
lows that the signifier is a product of difference: one sound or
written mark has meaning only because it differs from an-
80 Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology