“But what if the existence of such a world is an illusion? What if there is no world before signs, no ultimate presence, no pre-semiotic speech, no possibility of specie, no redemption by gold, no grounding of signs in an origin, no intrinsic self-signifying icon of value? If all signs owe their being to, and are necessarily preceded by, other signs, if the signs are in principle inconvertible into non-signs,if the promise to deliver specie is necessarily void, then paper texts cease to be what they claim - secondary tokens representing a prior world - and become instead items in a world from which signs can never be absent. If such is the case, then what they took to be their ‘meaning’, to be delivered up as a relation to that signless world, becomes a phantom, a reification of an illusory presence. In short, paper texts would cease to ‘mean’ in the sense they themselves give to this term: they would not be able to be redeemed in terms more original, more ‘present’, more palpably ‘real’ than themselves: they would therefore be signs in a state of unacknowledged and irreparable dislocation from what they take to be their signifieds.”