I have just spent some time working through what Derrida calls ‘the tradition of the concept of the sign, and … the originality of Saussure's contribution within this continuity’ (OG: 324). This analysis of Saussure's contribution to this tradition was undertaken in the faith that we can speak coherently of ‘the tradition of the concept of the sign’. It is curious, however, given his ef orts to identify logocentric operations in the metaphysics of philosophy, that Derrida should be so willing to speak of ‘the concept of the sign’ as if it had an identity and a history independent from the names one might assign to it. Such a commitment also seems to override everything in Saussure's own theory of semiology that rejects the very possibility of concepts with histories. Exactly how does this concept exist through time: as a signified without a signifier, or as a signified which is passed from one signifier to another, from σύμβολον to signum to signe? In Saussurean terms, we would have to ask how this concept survives the linguistic rigours of the passing of time.

And so, if, in the previous chapter we finally came to understand that what holds Saussure back from all the loosening implications of his work, all that marks him as maintaining a relationship with presence, is carried by his continued use of ‘the concept of the sign’, then what is this concept, and what is its history?