The Sign

Even in the most naïve sense, without qualification, the term sign imposes great difficulties. The word designates any thing, whether gesture, mark, token, symbol or even natural event, that expresses, indicates or refers to a meaning or to something else. Yet even that most general and innocent statement offers at best a futile answer, as if to a question that already presupposes it: “what does the word sign designate?” The presupposition of a prior meaning infects all interpretations of the word sign, which is always thus figured as a latecomer, standing in for something, a thing or a concept that precedes it. But the concept sign, if it does refer back to a prior meaning, refers back only to itself—that which means something other than itself. Jacques Derrida, the most eloquent of modern philosophers, deliberately adopts the undoubtedly clunky rhetorical procedure, borrowed from Martin Heidegger, of crossing out the words presupposed by the question of the sign: “The sign is that ill-named thing, the only one, that escapes the instituting question of philosophy: ‘what is...?’” (Of Grammatology 18). These clumsily visible removals—of the copula and its predicate—nonetheless contribute to a suggestive series: erasure; sign; singular; ill-named; escape. Effects of the copula and of predication do indeed occur but only because the sign erases itself; it differs from itself in its repetition, thus escaping the economy of predication that it makes possible. The formulation in effect compromises any distinction between signs and what they signify, and reveals instead an economy of repetition that precedes and makes possible all acts of signification and, more pertinently, must be presupposed by the instituting question of philosophy, “what is ...?” The sign would thus differ from itself in its singular repeatability, always the same but never identical (A=A). For the combined effects of difference and repeatability Derrida has used the word iterability, which can confidently be substituted for the notion of the sign.