Jacques Derrida’s essay “Différance” began as an address to the Société française de philosophie given in January 1968 and was first published in that institution’s Bulletin later in the same year. The previous year Derrida had published three extremely important texts – Of Grammatology, Writing & Difference and Speech & Phenomena – which had made his early intellectual reputation; all three dealt with the “deconstructive” approach that was to define Derrida’s early work and of which the (non-)concept “différance” was perhaps the most noted manifestation. The form in which the essay is now best known is as it was published in the 1972 collection Margins of Philosophy (English translation by Alan Bass released in 1982), and it is to this version that I refer in what follows.
