Jesus, Everybody Calm Down

Part of the way through "The Outside and the Inside" and the basic story Derrida is laying out is good guys vs. bad guys. In honor of postmodernism's typographical exuberance and also just to keep things straight I'm going to highlight terms relating to the former in green and terms relating to the latter in red.

Derrida is critiquing the distinctions Saussure draws between speech and writing. Much of this is expressed through an inside vs. outside metaphor that Derrida attributes to Saussure, where J.D. claims that F.d.S. claims that speech is inside—warm, organic, close to the heart—while writing is outside—artificial, invasive, sullying. J.D. of course wants to say this is all bassackwards, and presents various quotes from F.d.S. in which he appears to be putting forth this melodramatic hostility towards writing per se. I haven't read Saussure so I don't know how accurate a representation of his tone this is, but then Derrida responds in kind with his own melodramatic tone that makes Saussure sound like the Man, trying to harsh our graphological mellow, and the whole thing just kinda spins off. To the speech vs. writing axes I hypothesized earlier I'll add a fourth one: (4) writing is preferable to speech for aesthetic emotional reasons.

Okay, it's not quite as bad as all that. I may have to read this part more closely; my initial sympathies in this chapter are with Saussure because, tone aside, many of the passages quoted sound like admonishments I'd give to a freshman linguistics class as a way of heading off questions like "What's the difference between the 'f' sound in 'fish' and 'physics'?" So my sense is that F.d.S. is making some reasonable methodological points, albeit in slightly overblown language, and then J.D. is choosing to focus on the overblown parts and work himself into a tizzy. But there may be a substantive critique beneath the hysteria.