Editing Deconstruction (section)

===Influence of Saussure===
Derrida approaches all texts as constructed around elemental oppositions which all [[discourse]] has to articulate if it intends to make any sense whatsoever. This is so because identity is viewed in [[Non-essentialism|non-essentialist]] terms as a construct, and because constructs only produce meaning through the interplay of [[difference (philosophy)|difference]] inside a "system of distinct signs". This approach to text is influenced by the [[semiology]] of [[Ferdinand de Saussure]].<ref>{{cite book|last1=Royle|first1=Nick|title=Jacques Derrida|date=2003|publisher=Routledge|location=London|isbn=9780415229319|pages=6–623|edition=Reprint|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=nNaSdb9VMTwC&pg=PA62|access-date=8 September 2017|language=en}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|last1=Derrida|first1=Jacques|last2=Ferraris|first2=Maurizio|title=A Taste for the Secret|date=2001|publisher=Wiley|isbn=9780745623344|page=76|quote=I take great interest in questions of language and rhetoric, and I think they deserve enormous consideration; but there is a point where the authority of final jurisdiction is neither rhetorical nor linguistic, nor even discursive. The notion of trace or of text is introduced to mark the limits of the linguistic turn. This is one more reason why I prefer to speak of 'mark' rather than of language. In the first place the mark is not anthropological; it is prelinguistic; it is the possibility of language, and it is every where there is a relation to another thing or relation to an other. For such relations, the mark has no need of language.}}</ref>

Saussure is considered one of the fathers of [[structuralism]] when he explained that terms get their meaning in reciprocal determination with other terms inside language:

<blockquote>In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. [...] A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass thought engenders a system of values.<ref name="Saussure"/></blockquote>

Saussure explicitly suggested that linguistics was only a branch of a more general semiology, a science of signs in general, human codes being only one part. Nevertheless, in the end, as Derrida pointed out, Saussure made linguistics "the regulatory model", and "for essential, and essentially metaphysical, reasons had to privilege speech, and everything that links the sign to phone".<ref name="Derrida2"/>{{rp|21, 46, 101, 156, 164}} Derrida will prefer to follow the more "fruitful paths (formalization)" of a general semiotics without falling into what he considered "a hierarchizing teleology" privileging linguistics, and to speak of "mark" rather than of language, not as something restricted to mankind, but as prelinguistic, as the pure possibility of language, working everywhere there is a relation to something else.{{citation needed|date=August 2021}}