In his translator's introduction to Writing and Difference, Alan Bass notes that:

Which helps to explain the exasperation of theorists such as Searle or Harris when all that Derrida offers might be a pun (or a lexical association, or an etymology, or a rebus-like play on his own name) in the place of sustained argument. Such wordplay, Christopher Norris suggests, will strike many Anglo-American scholars as ‘a kind of sophistical doodling on the margins of serious, truth-seeking discourse’ (79). In this investigation I have taken the position that Derrida's rhetorical strategy has a finite validity that is entirely rigorous, and not at all a matter of confusion or of deliberate abuse. Certain elements of Derrida's strategy, however, are difficult to refute without risking being accused of completely missing the point. I have taken on this task in the belief that making the discourses of Derrida and Saussure engage is at least partly possible, that the failures of engagement will be as illuminating as the successes, and, in the end, that a coherent resistance to the Derridean reading of Saussure can be made.