Little Fish Eats the Big Fish

Emphasis J.D.'s:

Even though semiology was in fact more general and more comprehensive than linguistics, it continued to be regulated as if it were one of the areas of linguistics.
–pg. 51

I've had the same thought and, if frustration is indeed what J.D.'s italics is expressing here, felt the same frustration. When I first heard about semiotics I thought, "Oh cool, here's a superset of linguistics that will tell me how language fits into the larger scheme of communication." But in practice it seems to be more the other way around–that semiotics involves applying linguistic metaphors to non-linguistic things. ("It's like film has a grammar, see?...") This isn't particularly illuminating for someone already versed in linguistic metaphors, and also gets more and more strained the further the non-linguistic things get from natural language.

Is Arche-Writing Just Semiotics?

In "The Outside Is The Inside" J.D. tries to not just attack F.d.S.'s privileging of speech over writing, but articulate his own idea of the way things should be. About midway through the section he starts to talk about "arche-writing" rather than writing per se (or, as J.D. puts it a "vulgar" notion of writing). So are we talking about ink marks on a piece of paper or something broader and more abstract? Sometimes J.D. seems to want it one way, sometimes another.

It goes without saying that it's unclear what he means by "arche-writing", but again gleaning from usage the term seems to refer to a more general form of communicative symbolic opposition that would underlie both speech and vulgar writing, and maybe much else besides. It sounds a lot like what other people would call "semiotics". As with transcendental signified and trace, he seems to be coining a new term where one already exists.