Derrida...who sees, interestingly, for the present purpose, a much more probleamtic reationship between speech and writing than that proposed by the anthropologists idea of writing as n insufficent and super imposed substuite for natural speech. Derridas skepticism, which places both speech and writing in the the position of insufficency, where the signs are not just different from one other (as in Saussure) but lead to endlessly deferred meanings, is in strong controst to Rosseua's romanticism, with its belief in the supoerity of the natural. In the writing/singing of hymns, however, Derrida's idea of 'the unstable realtionship between couples such as speech/writing is one which correpssonds to the protean adapbility and changeability of a hymn text...

Watson, the English Hymn, 23/4