Thus, signifiers are words that refer to other words and never reach out to material objects and their interrelations. Meaning, to some extent, always escapes one's grasp-it is always just out of reach, ungrounded, with no origin in the intention of the speaker, contrary to what Husserl thought. There is nothing there in her speech but language, i.e. a network of signification . The connotation may be thought of as the aura of suggestion, the echo or trace of other words to which it is related by such things as association, common usage, similarity, etc. Meaning is never fully present in any one signifier, but is infinitely deferred or suspended.
Meaning is contextual, i.e. affected by related words.
There is always an excess of meaning. But there is another, more radical, consequence that can be drawn from our analysis. If the meaning associated with an expression is not present in the expression itself, and if the speaker must make his own presence felt by communication through words, then it follows that the speaker is never fully present in the act of using language. In other words, I am never present even to myself . Rather, it is language that speaks, not a unified and autonomous ego or self.