“The easiest way to see what I have in mind is to look at Derrida’s roots in structuralism. According to structuralist linguistics, a sign signifies a signified, but the signifying power of the sign is rooted in its difference from other signs and not the signified. For classical structuralism, such as that of de Saussure, language is “a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others.” Although de Saussure doesn’t emphasize it, the definition just offered reduces the importance of the signified; one of Derrida’s principle changes is to make explicit the denial of the existence of the signified. This has the effect, for Derrida, of enabling one to think of language as a system of free floating signs that are not attached or “nailed down” by being linked to a signified. The denial of a reference entails the “endless play of signifiers,” of which the early Derrida made so much: in short order this denial of reference was expanded to include an explicit denial of any kind of “transcendental signified” that would function to put a stop to the play of language; this includes but is not limited to God. Later, Derrida claims: “One could call play the absence of the transcendental signified as limitlessness of play, that is to say as the destruction of ontotheology and the metaphysics of presence”. Derrida is quite explicit that the denial of a transcendental signifier means that there is nothing outside of the text to organize or interpret it: not being or any other transcendental origin to the world. The world is nothing but play, nothing but the free floating of signifiers without any natural or necessary connection to anything beyond or before the world that would organize them.”
-Brian Harding, Not Even a God Can Save Us Now: Reading Machiavelli After Heidegger
