Elucidating Derrida and Differance: Lecture given at Temple University (2006)

“We provisionally give the name “difference” to this sameness which is not identical.”

Derrida’s concept “differance” has its basis in contradiction. What Derrida is essentially “doing,” though he might balk at the notion that formulating “differance” could be “doing” anything, is moving Saussure’s theories of language into an expanded realm, that might be said to include the ontological, or the metaphysical, or both (or neither.) As we remember, Saussure, in founding Structuralism with his Course in General Linguistics, posited that “in languages there are only differences,” i.e. all phonemes and other elements of language take their identity from all other phonemes and language elements, and are defined relationally rather than individually. Derrida is telling us that in naming “differance” through a displacement of “e” to “a”, he is, among other things, broadening the parameters of Saussure’s insight beyond language and linguistic signs. The play of differences, Derrida tells us, is operational in every human sphere, and in all situations in which entities/substances/essences are perceived or intuited. All things are perceived and identified through the principle of “difference,” i.e. all things take their meaning (in the broadest sense) from other things from which they differ. By taking Saussure’s theory out of linguistics and casting it in a more expansive light, Derrida posits a “relative universe” in which individual identity, as “owned” by a constitutive and constituting subject, becomes problematic as it is seen that identity is structured out of “difference,” plays of difference.

Derrida’s use of the word “provisionally” is important. It signifies a temporary condition, an impermanent usage. This sets Derrida apart from earlier philosophers, like Nietzsche and Heidegger, who were much more definite and authoritative in their pronouncements. The conditions by which post-Structural thought was created entailed a radical rethinking of writing, the author, authority, and “privilege,” so that once the individual, with his/her constitutive ego, was reduced by “differance” to a sort of “liminal limbo,” the act of writing, creating signs, and setting forth a specific “play of differences” became fraught with all sorts of complications and limitations that made every claim “provisional.” If not just language but people exist in a “play of differences”, and if this state is marked out by a permanent condition of “difference,” then how can any given “person” (and person does, in this context, need quotation marks) claim to use linguistic signs with authority? “Differance” is operative on people, and on language too, so that when a person attempts to use language instrumentally, a “double bind” inevitably and invariably arises. Even naming this bind is a double bind, or maybe a triple bind; the constitutive subject, the linguistic sign, and the anti-concept/anti-word “differance” all chafe against an attempted “stranglehold by definition” in linguistic signage. Thus, the language of qualification becomes imperative. Derrida cannot strangle “differance” into submission; it is too evanescent, too ungraspable; he must talk “around” it, and everything he says must be qualified and guarded against facile usage that guarantees misunderstanding. In fact, any claim to completely grasp “differance” would, to Derrida, seem fraudulent, because there is nothing to grasp, or a mere phantom. “Differance” exists, or has its being, or its “charged non-existence,” in a crepuscular wilderness of shadows. If Derrida is to use language instrumentally, his strategy (and Derrida emphasizes in this article the importance of strategy and risk when dealing with “differance”) must be equivocation. It is not that “differance” is ineffable, but that once it is signified, it ceases to be visible. To use a quote from Wittgenstein, it cannot be “said,” it may only, possibly, be “shown.” Although, to be fair, it cannot really be shown either, as it may lie beyond our capacity for understanding. Thus, equivocation becomes the only means by which Derrida can avoid falling into the traps of authoritatively secure language, which is seen, ultimately, to be anything but secure. Equivocation is also the best way to deal with a “sameness which is not identical,” i.e. a process and a quality that are omnipresent where being, beings, and forms of communication persist, but which takes its expression through both the individual properties of any given entity and properties (or concepts or signs) shared between entities.

“Differance is neither a word nor a concept.”

This gets to the heart of the matter, and, revealingly, the heart of the matter turns out to be a negative proposition. A fundamental duality within “differance” reveals itself, in that Derrida has created a word which he claims is not a word. Either this is a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, or Derrida is once again equivocating against authorial authority, his own constitutive subject-ness, and the signifying confines of language perpetually caught in a synchronic (and, for many readers, hermeneutic) circle. If nothing else, Derrida can be said to be consciously moving a piece on Saussure’s chess-board. It might even be more accurate to say that he is stealing a piece, and in fact Derrida does at one point in this article use the analogy of a king about to be killed. “Differance” is seen to be not a word because Derrida posits “differance” as what happens between words. That is, “differance” is the play of differences by which words and phonemes define themselves, but because it is impossible to define this “play” without tautologically referring back to it, “difference,” in the negative space where it finds its definition, cannot be signified. Yet, for Derrida to lay this particular card on the table, it must be signified. We see that Derrida is playing the “sign-game” with the not-fortuitous and irrevocable knowledge that no victory is possible. If “differance” had to be defined and given “entity-status,” we would call it a “negative entity.” Just as words, things, and people cannot exist or subsist without other words, things, and people, “differance” has no positive existence (or Derrida might say, no existence at all) outside the context of a world inhabited by contingencies and contingent beings. Were Derrida to authoritatively call “differance” a word, he would be claiming for it the kind of pawn-on-the-chessboard existence that Saussure posits for words within his schema of the word-as-sign.

Saussure, we remember, claims that words consist of the signifier, a sound image, and the signified, a concept. Once “differance” leaves the negative space where it belongs and becomes a sound-image, among thousands of other sound-images, it is no longer “difference.” “Differance” itself, as a sound-image, becomes something on which “differance” acts, from a place outside of “difference.” As nothing can act on itself from outside of itself, this is a logical absurdity. Derrida feels doubly absurd about this, as he is the one forcing “differance” to act on “differance” from outside itself, by naming it. So, Derrida only feels comfortable in the authoritative role when he puts forth something he knows is contradictory, and, possibly, absurd.

Were Derrida a strict Saussurian and nothing else, he might feel settled about positing “concept status” for “difference.” After all, an unnamed concept that is “talked around” still might avoid the play of differences that Saussure enumerates in language. However, because Derrida is not merely following Saussure’s precepts but radically extending them, and because this extension takes Saussure’s claims for language and applies them to many other things, we see that differance-as-concept is no more or less absurd than differance-as-sign. Derrida sees that concepts, like linguistic signs, are acted upon by differance, defined by what they have or lack in relation to other concepts. If differance were a concept, we would again see the logical absurdity of differance acting on differance from outside itself. Thus, on a theoretical level (differance-as-concept), as well as on a material one (differance-as-sign), Derrida is forced by the difficulty of his construct to hedge bets. Differance must be both a sound-image and a concept, and a non-sound-image and a non-concept. In both states of being, positive and negative, differance has no identity other than that of a differentiating phantom.

      “Differance indicates the closure of presence…effected in the functioning of traces.”

Things present themselves to us, generally and initially, as discrete totalities. If we read a poem by Baudelaire, we (hopefully) focus our attention on it, to the exclusion of all other things. The poem grips us as we gradually apprehend its totality. We might read it once, twice, or three times. It is present to us, becomes our present moment within a surfeit of our attention. During this time-period, we do not think relationally about the poem. It is simply there, in front of us, a series of linguistic signs conspiring to present an impression of discreet totality-within-presence. However, the discreet totality of a poem by Baudelaire, or any work of art, or anything that rivets our attention, is eventually and inevitably mediated by differance. “Differance” indicates the “closure of presence” because when it begins to infiltrate our perceptions, we notice “traces,” parts of whatever we happen to be perceiving, which remind us that the perceived totality of our object is in fact an illusion, and that what we perceive exists, as all things do, only relationally. If we happen to be reading a poem, we think of other poems, other poets, other times we have seen words used in the poem in other places, etc. Once this process begins, our object ceases to be “present” to us, and the energy that constitutes “present encounters” dissipates and diffuses. “Traces” are important for Derrida because they are a constant reminder of “difference,” and that “presence” as such is easily closed in a relational, differentially-aware consciousness. “Traces” are perceived differently by different people, but the process by which traces “close presence” (i.e. the way we notice traces of things in other things, traces of words in other words, etc.) is consistent.

Simply put, we do not perceive things individually. Everything that is perceived by us leads us to perceptions that mediate initial impressions, which continue to be mediated for as long as we perceive a given object. The process of mediation is internal, and means that when it begins (and it begins almost immediately), the object perceived is no longer wholly present to us. “Differance” thus distorts (though a less pejorative term like “mediates” might do just as well) our contact with things, diffuses our ability to focus. When we are not “present” for the objects we perceive, when “traces” lead us to think relationally about objects, we have entered the “ghost-world” wherein “differance” exerts sovereign influence and where subjectivity is lost in shadows. It leads us out of the present, and we see that when Derrida brings in a spatio-temporal dimension to the discussion of “difference,” this is partly where he is leading us. For Derrida, “differance” places things in time, because where we are in time has to do with our “relational state,” how we are placed in relation to other things, how we and the world around us are “sequenced.”

“Signification: differance of temporalizing”

In this way, Derrida demonstrates that signification is a way of creating a sense of time passing. When we talk, we talk “in time,” as a way of “marking time,” i.e. summarizing “states of affairs” as they exist in a moment, or, depending on the context, many moments. We are able to demarcate, with linguistic signs, what “now” is and consists of, what “then” was and consisted of, etc. It is primarily through language, and other forms of signification, Derrida argues, that we are able to do this. Things that we place with linguistic signs are always placed “in time,” so to speak, and so the play of differences as they exist between moments are expressed in language. Again, a “meta” dimension creeps into Derrida’s thinking; the constitutive subject, the dialect, and the moment being expressed are subject to “differance” simultaneously and on both similar and different levels; thus, our attempts to place states of affairs in time are mediated by the play of differences in language and in the constitutive subject as well. Every human utterance is “timed”; it takes a certain amount of forethought to plan and a certain amount of time to say or write. What is expressed in speaking or writing is the creation of a moment among moments, a statement among statements, possibly a summation among summations. There is no way to escape the relativity and contingency of a world bound every which way by differance. Now that Saussure has been moved out of the confines of language and into the broader realities of space and time, we see that “in language there are only differences” might become “in the world of perceptible reality there are only differences.” If this is acknowledged and accepted as fact, it is easy to see why post-Structuralism and Deconstructionism would argue against the belief in the reality of a discreet, closed, unmediated subjectivity.

On the other hand, the very act of “accepting” a philosophical precept as fact becomes in and of itself problematic. Facts are closed entities, or are held as such by the constitutive subject. “Differance”, ghost though it may be, seems to open things up so that the very act of accepting it as a fact, or even calling it “it,” would belie Derrida’s intention. Because Derrida must equivocate, because “differance” is seen to be neither a word nor a concept, Derrida might’ve known that “intention”, as such, did not apply to his concept. “Intention” implies the kind of constitutive, authoritative self-hood that Derrida is negating. It is an irony that “differance” seems to have been no less confounding to its creator than it remains to us today. This probably accounts for Derrida’s admission in this piece that differance is a “difficult, confusing” concept. If in the perceptible world there are only differences, and if this applies to language as part of the perceptible world, and also to any constitutive subject, we are forced to recognize the nothingness, or near-nothingness, of human perception and hence human will. “Differance” may be seen as a ghost or a kind of haunting, a binding which no one and nothing can undo. On the other hand, a more positive reading of “differance” might say that it is a mode of spiritual development, of getting beyond the confines of ego and subjectivity and into a more realistic realm, albeit one mediated by a ghost. It would be nice to conclude with a definitive statement, but that would seem inappropriate to this text. All that remains is to place this moment in time through language, and so, with apologies for any authoritative utterance, I end here.    

Adam Fieled, October 16, 2006