The Illusion of Origin: Derrida, Saussure, and the System of Differences

 Introduction

In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida offers a radical critique of the Western metaphysical tradition that privileges speech over writing, treating the former as the origin and essence of meaning. He challenges the notion of a pure beginning, a singular point from which truth flows directly and unproblematically. Instead, Derrida posits a vision of language as a system of signs defined not by their connection to an origin, but by an endless play of differences. The passage from the section The Outside is the Inside beginning with “In this play of representation, the point of origin becomes ungraspable...” encapsulates this shift. He writes: “There are things like reflecting pools, and images, an infinite reference from one to the other, but no longer a source, a spring.”¹ The origin, in this model, is not a source but a function within a chain of representations—a product of repetition, displacement, and différance. This reconceptualization finds a surprising resonance in Ferdinand de Saussure’s insistence that the origin of language is not a relevant concern for the linguist. Both thinkers decenter origin as a meaningful category, focusing instead on the internal logic of sign systems and the relational nature of meaning.

Reflecting Pools and Infinite Deferral

Derrida’s metaphor of “reflecting pools” is a compelling image for understanding the recursive play of signs. In a traditional view, one might expect language to mirror thought, to lead from a sign to a fixed referent. But for Derrida, every sign leads not to presence but to another sign, creating what he calls “an infinite reference from one to the other.”² This is not a failure of language but its very structure—a mise en abyme where meaning is indefinitely deferred.

This logic undermines the presumed immediacy and authenticity of speech. If both spoken and written signs are caught in this chain of deferral, neither can lay claim to originary status. Derrida thus deconstructs the foundational binary of speech/writing. He exposes the metaphysical bias that elevates speech as the transparent medium of thought, revealing it instead as one modality among others, equally mediated and differential. “There is no longer a simple origin,” he insists.³ The absence of a stable beginning is not a historical claim, but a structural one: within a system of representation, there can be no final anchor for meaning.

Splitting the Double: From Image to Difference

Derrida intensifies this insight by arguing that the act of reflection itself—understood as the relation between sign and referent, or writing and speech—is not neutral but divisive. “What is reflected is split in itself and not only as an addition to itself of its image.”⁴ The image (writing) does not simply copy the original (speech); it fractures it. The “double” does not reproduce a prior unity but reveals a constitutive split. The mirror, far from restoring presence, multiplies difference.

This operation retroactively reveals that the original was never whole. Writing, far from being a secondary representation of speech, reveals speech itself to be derivative and unstable. Derrida’s formula—“the law of the addition of the origin to its representation... is that one plus one makes at least three”⁵—captures this logic. Meaning arises not from the unity of sign and concept but from the excess, the surplus, that results from their interaction. Difference is not a deviation from identity but its condition of possibility.

Saussure, Synchrony, and the Irrelevance of Origins

Fascinatingly, this displacement of origin echoes Ferdinand de Saussure’s approach in Course in General Linguistics. Saussure argues that “at any given period, however far back in time we go, a language is always an inheritance from the past... no society has ever known its language to be anything other than something inherited from previous generations.”⁶ For Saussure, the origin of language is neither accessible nor relevant. The foundational act of naming, “an act we can conceive in the imagination,” has never been observed.⁷ Therefore, he insists, “the question of the origins of language does not have the importance generally attributed to it. It is not even a relevant question as far as linguistics is concerned.”⁸

This methodological position closely aligns with Derrida’s critique. Saussure’s synchronic method—his focus on language as a system at a given moment—parallels Derrida’s decision to analyze the play of signs within an already-operating network. Both reject speculative origin stories in favor of structural analysis. For Saussure, meaning arises from differences between signs in a closed system, not from reference to external things. In this sense, Derrida’s différance radicalizes Saussure’s difference: not only are signs defined by differences, but these differences are constitutive of identity itself. Meaning is never present in full; it is always deferred.

The Origin Becomes a Difference

At the heart of both Derrida’s and Saussure’s theories lies the rejection of a stable, knowable beginning. “The origin of the speculation becomes a difference,” Derrida writes.⁹ This phrase does not signal the replacement of one origin with another, but the dissolution of origin as a viable concept. There is no originary presence, no primal signified. What appears to be foundational—speech, thought, logos—is always already mediated, split, and replayed within a system of differences.

Saussure’s view that language is always “an inheritance from the past” reinforces this displacement. The system of language never starts from zero. There is no Edenic moment when words were naturally assigned to things. That imagined moment is, as Saussure notes, “an act we can conceive in the imagination, but no one has ever observed it taking place.”¹⁰ It is a myth of origin. Derrida would add: such myths are not only unobserved, but structurally impossible within a system of signs where each element gains meaning only through difference.

The final twist in Derrida’s analysis is the suggestion that our very attempt to retrieve the origin—through reflection, doubling, writing—is itself what produces the illusion of origin. The “historical usurpation and theoretical oddity that install the image within the rights of reality”¹¹ is the very mechanism by which the origin is fabricated—and simultaneously forgotten. The mirror doesn’t show us what was there from the beginning; it creates what we take to be the beginning by splitting it, reflecting it, and adding difference.

Conclusion: Toward a Theory Without Origins

Derrida and Saussure, each in their own register, propose a view of language that dispenses with the notion of origin. In place of a foundational signified, we find systems in motion, structures defined by internal relations and oppositions. For Saussure, this leads to a synchronic linguistics that treats language as a self-sufficient whole. For Derrida, it opens up a deconstructive practice that reveals how every origin is produced by the play of signs, not prior to it.

In both cases, the search for origin—whether of language, meaning, or presence—proves to be an epistemological trap. The illusion of a pure beginning obscures the real work of signification, which takes place not in a mythical past but in the spacing and deferral of the present. The reflecting pools that Derrida describes do not return us to an essence; they multiply and split, revealing that the self, the sign, and the system are always already other than themselves.

Bibliography

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, translated by Roy Harris. London: Duckworth, 1983.

Footnotes

1. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 157.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 158.
6. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 107.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 157.
10. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 107.
11. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 158.