Differance

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.


In the first part of the essay Derrida sought to explain the significance of the word “différance” itself, which he described as ‘a kind of gross spelling mistake’ (p. 3). This mistake involved the substitution of an a for the usual second e. However, owing to the nature of pronunciation, this spelling mistake remains unintelligible to the listener – it can only be conveyed in writing, a fact which Derrida described as ‘mute irony’. “Différance,” then, ‘is literally neither a word nor a concept’ according to Derrida.

It is extremely important that we understand the implications of this assertion (the phrase is repeated on p. 7), because it has too often been glossed over by commentators: the French (non-)word “différance” is no more real than its English equivalent “differance”. Derrida employed it as a neologism for two reasons. Firstly, as a reference to the meaning of the French verb différer – from the Latin differe and not the Greek diapherein, which provides the root of the Germanic concept of difference – as both “to differ” (‘spacing’) and “to defer” (‘temporization’) (pp. 7-8). Secondly, to draw the reader's attention to the primary role Derrida thought we attribute to speech in determining the meaning of words. Thus, by retaining Derrida's French and elevating a neologism to the status of a concept we risk glossing over his point about the tyranny of speech over writing. ‘The a of différance ’ explained Derrida in his inimitable style, is an ‘Egyptian Pyramid … silent, secret and discreet as a tomb’ (p. 4).

We can see, then, that “différance” is Derrida's description of the ‘blind tactics’ and ‘empirical wandering’ or ‘play’ (p. 7) at the heart of all linguistic systems based on ‘the system of phonetic writing’ (pp. 4-5) (phonetics is the attempt to formalise written signs on the basis of phonemes – from the Greek phōnēma, “sound uttered”). It radicalises the temporal features of linguistic meaning first identified by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure – difference as deferral, as ‘a detour, a delay, a relay, a reserve, a representation’ that ‘suspends the accomplishment or fulfilment of “desire” or “will”’ (p. 8). As a result, Derrida was able to assert that language is ‘immediately and irreducibly polysemic’ while at the same time positing “différance” as a potentially ‘constitutive, productive and originary causality’ (pp. 8-9).

Derrida justified his adoption of this ‘middle voice’ by using “différance” as a means of elaborating our understanding of linguistic signs in general, which, within this regime of “différance”, are ‘both secondary and provisional’ because at one and the same time both derived and mediated (p. 9). In other words, “différance” would be the very thing which makes the system of meaning possible in the first place, hence ‘originary’. Once again, Derrida refers here to Saussure as the ‘common inaugurator’ of this ‘general semiology’ based on the ‘arbitrary’ and ‘differential’ conception of the linguistic sign, according to which ‘in language there are only differences’ and ‘only differences without positive terms’ (pp. 10-1). Thus, extrapolated Derrida, ‘every concept is inscribed in a chain or in a system within which it refers to … other concepts … by means of the systematic play of differences’ (p. 11 – my emphasis, note the contradictory sense). Derrida summarised in simple terms:

Différance is the non-full, non-simple, structured and differentiating origin of differences. (p. 11)

Moreover, within this ‘systematic play’ that Derrida called “différance,” ‘differences have been produced’ (p. 11) and have left behind traces of their productive process. Again following on from Saussure, Derrida elaborated by asserting that ‘language, or any code, any system of referral in general, is constituted “historically” as a weave of differences’ (p. 12). “Différance,” then, is the ‘archi-trace,’ the trace of that by which ‘each so-called “present” element … is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element’ (is divided from the start) – in other words, “différance” is ‘spacing, the becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space (temporization)’ (p. 13).


In the second part of the essay, Derrida outlined a ‘gesture’ (p. 17) within the history of philosophy that approximated his own strategy with respect to “differance” – albeit a gesture which utilised the (unavoidable) ‘metaphysical language’ (p. 12) of general semiology. To begin with, Derrida briefly discussed the subjective experience of language hinted at by both Hegel and Saussure, which he saw leading towards ‘a kind of writing before the letter’ wherein ‘the subject becomes a speaking subject only in its commerce with the system of linguistic differences’ (pp. 15-6). Our understanding of ‘consciousness’, argued Derrida, is founded on the privileging of ‘self-presence’, which Derrida describes as ‘the ether of metaphysics’ (p. 16). “Differance,” on this reading, seeks to displace presence in the system of thought, in much the same way as Nietzsche’s ‘forces’, defined as ‘the displaced and equivocal passage of one different thing to another’ (‘the eternal return,’ in Nietzschean terms – p. 17), and Freud’s ‘theory of the figure’, according to which ‘traces’ and ‘breaches’ are the markers of the impact of “differance” on the unconscious, ‘in the sense of putting into reserve’ (i.e. holding over, keeping buried) (p. 18). These Nietzschean and Freudian strategies, for Derrida, revealed ‘the very enigma of differance,’ its ‘mirage and illogicalness’ (p. 19) – ‘differance maintains our relationship with that which we necessarily misconstrue, and which exceeds the alternative of presence and absence’ (p. 20), and with respect to which ‘the language of presence and absence, the metaphysical discourse of phenomenology, is inadequate’ (p. 21).

With this last statement, Derrida rejected the totalising pretentions of the Hegelian ‘synthesis’ (or Aufhebung) in favour of an engagement with ‘a “past” that has never been present’ and a potential ‘future to come’ – ‘the trace’ (p. 21). It is at this point that Derrida introduced, briefly, ‘the entire critique of classical ontology undertaken by Levinas’ based on ‘the trace and enigma of absolute alterity: the Other’ (p. 21). However, this brief reference, which is barely elaborated other than its desire to ‘shake’ and ‘make tremble’ the entire history of philosophy, serves mainly to introduce the gesture with which Derrida is most clearly preoccupied – ‘Heidegger’s uncircumventable meditation’ on ‘the ontico-ontological difference’ (p. 22). As Derrida explained, “differance” is his attempt to think through Heidegger’s “ontological difference” by means of a double strategy of repeating and exceeding. It is in this sense that ‘differance, in a certain and very strange way, (is) “older” than the ontological difference’ – in other words, “differance” is Derrida’s word for the “trace” of that which the “ontological difference” seeks to explain (pp. 22-3). Moreover, in his reading of The Anaximander Fragment, Derrida argues that “differance” has a similar function to ‘presencing’ in Heideggerian thought, wherein ‘the present becomes the sign of the sign, the trace of the trace. It is no longer what every reference refers to in the last analysis. It becomes a function in a structure of generalized reference’ (pp. 23-4) – the present and the trace, we might say, swap places in the hierarchy.

On the basis of his critique, Derrida argued in conclusion that “differance” cannot be reduced to an ‘essence’ (p. 25), that ‘differance remains a metaphysical name’ (p. 26) and that ‘there never has been, never will be, a unique word, a master-name’ (p. 27) but only ‘a chain of differing and deferring substitutions’ (p. 26). Nevertheless, in contrast to the nihilistic consequences drawn from this by commentators, Derrida remained faithful both to ‘affirmation’ in the manner of Nietzsche and to ‘Heideggerian hope’ (p. 27). We would do well to heed his call.