Since Derrida seems to be calling attention to phonetic writing systems in particular I just want to take this opportunity to to point out that there are plenty of non-phonetic writing systems in the world. Writing systems vary greatly in their degree of phonetic accuracy, from the non-phonetic (Chinese), to ones that omit large amounts of phonetic information (Arabic), to ones that are basically phonetic but have tricky spelling rules (English, French), to ones that are pretty faithful to the acoustic signal (Spanish, Korean). But even those at the far end of the spectrum aren't completely phonetic. Even the International Phonetic Alphabet devised by linguists for the purposes of transcribing speech sounds can't capture every subtle variation in human speech. Not sure where he's going with the phonetic stuff, but I'm going to keep an eye out in case Derrida makes any sweeping statements about human language which really only apply to French and English. (He wouldn't be the first.)
The discussion of the limitations of the IPA does remind me of something I've said to introductory linguistics students: the only perfect transcription is an audio recording. Or, joking aside, any writing system has to be somewhat faithless to the audio signal, it has to omit some acoustic information, in order to qualify as a writing system. This seems similar to some of the presence vs. absence stuff Derrida discusses, but I can't tell if this is a true analogy or just a surface similarity because both are counterintuitive statements about language.
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