To classical theorists of language, a key distinguishing feature of writing is that it functions even in the absence of the author or authorial intention because it exists as a recording, while speech functions to directly signify only present intentions. However, Derrida points out that all signs are iterable, that is, they signify the same concepts every time they are repeated, whether or not the speaker is saying what she means. Thus, the death of the author (the absence informing writing) applies equally to spoken language, since, like writing, it is iterable even in the absence of the speaker's signified intentions. The correspondence of language (written or spoken) to its speaker's intentions, then, is purely contingent, for the language itself is characterized by the absence of the referent. Ironically, the fixity of the signifier/signified relationship, supposed to ground language in the immobility of the speaker's intentions and thereby rein in free play, actually reopens the semantic field to the play of substitutions by making every utterance iterable at any moment, regardless of intention or context. .
Thus, the central presence stabilizing the structure of language is not a central presence after all, but an absent center. For even if we would wish to verify that language represents its speaker's intentions, we would be unable to salvage this absent center without recourse to language, in all of its indeterminacy. Meaning, the arrival at the thing-itself, is always deferred to the next signifier in the movement of supplementarity, for, in Lévi-Strauss's words, "There is no real end to methodological analysis, no hidden unity to be grasped- (in SSP 287); one can ask, "But what does that mean?- ad infinitum without ever arriving at the referent. What Derrida's analysis points to is the impossibility of locating a transcendental signified or center beyond the reach of free play, for to represent this signified, one must give it meaning exogenously with a sign that "is added, occurs as a surplus, as a supplement- (SSP 289).
