J. Hillis Miller has undoubtedly been one of Derrida's most attentive and inventive readers from the first moments of the impact of his work in the United States. The tribute to de Man, discussed in the previous chapter (Miller 1985), nevertheless illustrates one of the central difficulties of extracting Derrida's core statements, such as those on the absence of signatory and referent, from their contexts. Aside from the ubiquitous terminology of presence and absence itself, Derrida's work is full of emblems and metaphors that represent these absences. The 'sun" is one such emblem, but "Writing" and "Arche-writing" in Of Grammatology are no less metaphorical in the way they represent the absence of the person who means or refers. This does not mean that signifying subjects or external objects, people and things, melt into air. The post card and the gramophone are among many emblems of absence, like the signature and telecommunications in general that come to stand in for this key characteristic of writing as language founded on absence.