"In the first place, by cleaving to absence, Derrida leaves the metaphysical correlation of meaning and presence in place, even as he claims that presence is that which is perpetually postponed. For the vehicle of Derridean différance, namely the sign, must perforce remain the same in its repeatedly pointing to something which never arrives. This renders both signification and repetition transcendentally univocal, precisely because they point to the nothing of postponed presence - and it should perhaps be noted that nothing is more identical than nothing is to nothing. In this way the very unmediability of an absolute radical difference, immune to any likeness, must collapse into its opposite, into identity, sameness and indifference. Its resolves, as a transcendental category, into absolute equivalence which comprehends or measures each difference after all.
   The second problem with the Derridean theory is that when difference is held as such optimum pitch, each assertion of discontinuity is identically superlative and attains a kind of homogeneous heterogeneity. Indeed, in the third place, for all his high talk, this in some way reduces the Derridean sign to the ideality of a perennially available and wordless thought which overcomes its own mediations and cleaves to presence. In the logic of deconstruction, there is no mediating relationship between différance and the various appearances of meaning which it organises or disorganises. In consequence, the universality of the "grammatological flux" is perhaps to be seen as a saturation of language which empties language of itself. As John D. Caputo explains, meanings are allowed "to slip loose, to twist free from their horizons, to leek and run off". (1) Thus, the Derridean sign relinquishes commitment to any specific epiphanies of meaning, or preferences for the lure of certain metaphors, and substitutes a universalised, autonomous and impersonal mathesis for language as such (as Gillian Rose rightly argued). For true difference and openness to the Other demand a sensitivity to the fact that some things are more alike than others, or are driven by the provocation of preference or desire which celebrates that difference all the better.
   In the fourth place, one might even say that, grammatically-speaking, the Derridean sign, in privileging absence which becomes after all the superlative present ibject, is cast in the indicative mood of the present tense, which is the very prototype of all language, only for a specifically Cartesian linguistics. One should add here that Derrida invokes the category of the middle voice to suggest that différance nonetheless does exceed the dichotomy of active and passive. However (as I have argued elsewhere), because for Derrida the sign commands the subject bespeaking or inscribing language, however much much a speaker or writer intends a meaning, the infinite play of autonomous "corridors of meaning" by definition always arrives over-against the subject to cancel the specificity of his or heur desire. (2) In this way the impersonally objectives rules, but such a notion of the objective, from Descartes onwards, is only available for the dispassionately representing subject. Hence any suggestion of postmodernism that the cartesian subject has been erased is a ruse  : in fact what it removes is the situated, embodied, specifically desiring historical subject, whereas it must secretly retain a transcendental subject who merely knows, since otherwise the indifferent rule of the sign would never "appear" as a transcendental truth.
   Finally, one should perhaps say a little more about the subject, as Derrida sees him or her. Insofar as Derrida hastens to undo any substantiality on the part of the subject's intention or desire when he or she elects a meaning in language - by insisting upon meaning as being withheld in an abstruse realm of postponement and by subjugating the speaking self to the sway of the grammatological flux - he after all assumes that the subject's intentionality is something that requires cancellation. In other words, he simply repeats the assumption that human will can only be construed as something that issues from a self-identical subject which commands all that it wills, He here enthrones a voluntarist subjectivity which wields dominion over all that it surveys, even as he insists upon the inevitable abdication of that subjectivity. His fear of the engulfing power of human desire - that same fear which forces Derrida to deny the giving or receiving of a gift, or any reciprocal relationship with the Other - too much equates desire with exhaustive acquisition, and suggests that there are mo modalities other than that of the indicative and the imperative, even if these modalities are consummated through deconstruction in Derrida's sceptical discourse. And if one can have no intimation at all of the postponed meanings of a sign through anticipation or desire - just as one cannot for Derrida ever present oneself, as oneself, to the Other, either woth one's gifts, praise or payer - then, like the air which surrounds us, that postponed meaning has in fact no distance from us at all. In refraining from every risk of reducing meaning to presence, one in fact finds this meaning is accorded a kind of hyperpresence which surrounds us with its untouchability. The preciosity of Derrida's demur accords absent meaning a stifling inaccessibility and unmediable enclosure within a revered guarded fortress. Such a construal renders absenece dialectically identical with an all-too-metaphysical fetishization of presence. ((3)
   Now, the foregoing critique of Derrida's account of the sign is by no means exhaustive, but what I have been trying to show is that it is neither presence as such nor absence as such which is culpably metaphysical, but rather the dichotomy itself, and that for all Derrida's exaltation of the indeterminacy and flux of meaning, by simply inversing the metaphysical structure of the sign, he stays within its paradigm, and ends up fetishizing presence after all."

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Notes :
(1) John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida : Religion without Religion (Bloomington and Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 13.
(2) Jacques Derrida, "Plato's Pharmacy" in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London : Athlone Press, 1981), pp. 63-171, pp. 95-96.
(3) Catherine Pickstock, After Writing (Oxford : Blackwell, 1998), chapter 3.

- in "Thomas Aquinas and the Quest for the Eucharist", Modern Theology, 15, 2, April 1999.