Black people vacated this signifier, then-incredibly-substituted as its concept a signified that stands for the system of rhetorical strategies peculiar to their own vernacular tradition.disrupted nature of the sign= signified/signifier equation itself (1553).Derrida’s neologism, “differance,” in its relation to “difference,” is a marvelous example of agnominatic, or repetition of a word with an alteration of both one letter and a sound (1552).

“Signification” and “signification” create a noisy disturbance in silence, at the level of the signifier.

The relationship that black “Signification” bears to the English “signification” is, paradoxically, a relation of indifference inscribed within a relation of identity (1552).

This confrontation is both political and metaphysical (1552). In the extraordinarily complex relationship between the two homonyms, we both enact and recapitulate the received classic confrontation between fro-American culture and American culture.

to compound the dizziness and the giddiness that we must experience in the vertiginous movement between these two “identical” signifiers, these two homonyms have everything to do with each other, then again, absolutely nothing.

The difficulty that we experience when thinking about the nature of the visual (re)doubling at work in a hall of mirrors is analogous to the difficulty we shall encounter in relating the black linguistic sign, “Signification,” to the standard English sign “signification” (1551).

If orientation prevails over madness, we soon realize that only the signifier has been doubled and (re)doubled, a signifier in this instance that is silent, a “sound-image” as Saussure defines the signifier, but a “sound-image” sans the sound.

My movement, then, is from hermeneutics to rhetoric and semantics, only to return to hermeneutics once again (1551).

Henry louis gates the signifying monkey