The work of the preceding five chapters has, I believe, gone some of the way towards demonstrating my claim that Derrida's engagement with Saussure is fragmented, tangential, and implicit. To make Derrida's writings engage more fully and directly with the Course, to gather together the threads of engagement from disparate sources and turn them towards the arguments of the Course, has required something of the ‘interminable hesitations’ that Derrida found in Saussure (OG: 329). If this hesitating work has allowed us to argue that Derrida's commentary on Saussure is not always attentive to the detail of the Course, then in return, it encourages us to restore something of the originality and specificity of Saussure within the epoch of the sign. Restoring this originality makes possible the two related ambitions of this book. The i rst was, and is, to demonstrate how Derrida, in attempting to apprehend the general project of Western metaphysics, goes too far in assimilating Saussure within a ‘classical’ tradition of the sign; a tradition which itself is of doubtful unity. The second ambition goes further: it is to suggest that Saussure's contribution to the epoch of the sign is not just more specific, but also not containable in its entirety by Derrida's discourse. In other words, elements of the Course's originality exceed Derrida's capacity to apprehend and contain them within his discourse of classical metaphysics. This second project becomes the priority from this chapter onwards.