"Arche-writing" (French: archi-écriture) is a term used by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his attempt to re-orient the relationship between speech and writing. Derrida argued that as far back as Plato, speech had been always given priority over writing. In the West, phonetic writing was considered as a secondary imitation of speech, a poor copy of the immediate living act of speech. Derrida argued that in later centuries philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and linguist Ferdinand de Saussure both gave writing a secondary or parasitic role. In Derrida's essay Plato's Pharmacy, he sought to question this prioritising by firstly complicating the two terms speech and writing.