In Of Grammatology, Derrida discusses writers such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Étienne Condillac, Louis Hjelmslev, Emile Benveniste, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Roman Jakobson, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, André Leroi-Gourhan, and William Warburton.

In the course of the work he deconstructs the philosophies of language and the act of writing given by these authors, identifying what he calls phonocentrism, and showing the myriad aporias and ellipses to which this leads them.

[4] Derrida quotes Saussure: "Language and writing are two distinct systems of signs; the second exists for the sole purpose of representing the first.

Derrida analyzes Rousseau in terms of what he calls a "logic of supplementarity,"[7] according to which "the supplement is exterior, outside of the positivity to which it is super-added, alien to that which, in order to be replaced by it, must be other than it.

"[8] Derrida shows how Rousseau consistently appeals to the idea that a supplement comes from the outside to contaminate a supposedly pure origin (of language, in this case).