hood. He even describes indication as “the process of death at
work in signs” (Speech 40 ). For Derrida everything is a sign,
which for him means that everything is founded on repetition
(on what he calls iterability) and on the false promise of per-
manence. This promise must fail because death is “inscribed”
in the sign itself.
Derrida, again, is assuming that all significance depends
on indication. But Husserl asserts that things may have mean-
ing without being indications. My expressions are never com-
pletelyreadable by others. I am still expressing, even when
close friends cannot tell whether I am grimacing or grinning—
when they can’t read me. Odd as it is, my expression embodies
my meaning whether or not this meaning is available to some-
one observing me. It is (so Husserl would argue) not originally
a sign, but an expressive motion.
In Husserl, then, the most telling case of meaning is one
in which I express something, even if no one sees or reads
me. For Derrida in Speech and Phenomena,by contrast, all
meaning implies the absence of the one who means, who ex-
presses. This is deeply counterintuitive. In the typical skeptic’s
fashion, Derrida wants to give the lie to our common sense of
ourselves. My expressive gestures feel like part of my living
present. Rather than being produced or “written” by me, my
gestures, one might almost say,areme. But for Derrida a truer
witness of meaning would be not my internal feeling for my
body’s gestures as expression, but rather a video recording of
my body’s motions. All that feels most inward is in fact, he in-
sists, merely outward. In this way, Derrida converts expression
into indication. Derridean meaning resides in signs that func-
tion in the absence of both sender (writer or speaker) and ref-
erent: “The total absence of the subject and object of a state-
ment—the death of the writer and/or the disappearance of the
56 From Algeria to the École Normale