Differance With an “A”

Difference, not Difference Derrida invents the term differance to refer to the alternative understanding of difference... not the difference `between' terms, but the passage of infinite, endless differentiation giving rise to apparent identities between which one might then argue there is difference.

Differance, not Difference For Derrida, the term means both to differ and to defer. That means the term is spatial and temporal. To defer is to have the sign slide into another moment so that the sign’s presence in its SELF-SAME MOMENT is impossible. The sign is thrown out of itself into a sliding of signs between signs that refer back and forth between each other in networking fashion. That is how the field of reference works: signs refer to other signs in order to generate meaning. That means signs, in their capacity to represent object-referents, must team with other signs. For instance, at the level of the word, you need an “o” and a “g” to go with a “d” to make the word “dog.” You need a number of signs to make the word, and it is in how they interrelate as to what word is made: dog or god. The same can be said for a sentence: you need a verb to conjoin with a noun to make a sentence. Sometimes you need a direct object, an indirect object and of course a period to complete a sentence. Signs connected to other signs make signification.

Differance, not Difference Because signs relate to other signs and they need to do so, any fixed “unresolved” identity is impossible. Differance is the unresolved deferral of the identity one might have ascribed to a particular term: an entirely fixed meaning for dog never definitively arrives. Meaning endlessly `differs', and any original presence of meaning is endlessly 'deferred'.

Differance, not Difference Derrida's emphasis that every sign leads to a sign permits him to conclude that 'there is no outside of the text'. Derrida does not mean there is nothing in the world but ink on the page. The term 'text' in his work does not refer only to books, nor to literal writing on paper. Like the term 'writing' in his work, `text' has been redefined by Derrida as the infinitely deferring movement of differentiation.

Differance, not Difference Text for Derrida means he generalizes the term, and he suggests the alternative definition of 'text': a heterogeneous, differential and open field of forces.

Differance, not Difference For Derrida, the world does not come first and then there are signs that depict it.

Differance, not Difference Derrida interrogates the tangles in which we become entwined when we ask what there is. We believe that there is something original, which is subsequently known, represented or hypothesized by us. The sentence 'there is nothing outside of the text' is not a statement about what there is, or is not in the world. The latter presupposes the category 'world', and the question 'what is true of that world?' It supposes that the 'world' comes first, as the origin of the secondary, descriptive sentences we generate about it and as guarantor of their truth or falsity.

All We Find is Relation But for Derrida, origins are always enmeshed in language: we read the world through consciousness so there is no hope of finding origins: ALL WE FIND IS RELATION!

All We Find is Relation ALL WE FIND IS REPRESENTATIONAL RELATIONS!

All We Find is Relation ALL WE FIND IS REPRESENTATIONAL RELATIONS THAT ARE RHETORICALLY RENDERED

All We Find is Relation We think there is a dog and we then provide a sign to depict it. But Derrida says that the meaning produces the dog as much as the dog helps curve back meaning onto it. Which is the origin, then?

All We Find is Relation Like the sign `dog', 'origin' is the effect of the movement of differance, of deferred and 'differentiated' meaning: the plays of language that project their supposedly original moment.

Differance But Don’t Misunderstand

Derrida could be considered indifferent to the question of 'what is there' in favor of 'how do we depict what there is?‘ For Derrida, origins are always depicted textually. Even to say that Derrida `reserves his judgment about what there 'is' collapses somewhat into what he avoids.

But Don’t Misunderstand Derrida does not definitively define any origin. He is interested in secondariness because that comes before the primary: the meaning makes the word; it constitutes our reality. Meaning gives life to the object, but the object precedes the word so we can’t start with meaning first and definitively.

But Don’t Misunderstand There is no first and definitively. There are combinations of relations.

But Don’t Misunderstand There may or may not be a 'beyond' to the plays of language about which he reserves his judgment. This is the beginning of a wordplay in which the 'world' and 'descriptive language' are already being figured in terms of oppositions between origin and secondarity.

But Don’t Misunderstand Derrida’s critics argue the following: surely there is something outside of the text: atoms, blood, rain, trees, bodies? Derrida seems to deny 'reality' in favor of `words'.

But Don’t Misunderstand Derrida cautions us not to misunderstand: This response misunderstands the sense in which Derrida means `text'. Like writing, he widens its definition.

But Don’t Misunderstand 'Text' for Derrida is such things as spacing, relationality, differentiation, deferral, delay. To say there is nothing outside the text is to say that there is always relationality and differentiation. No matter what we imagine as 'reality', it could be argued that differentiation is critical to it.

But Don’t Misunderstand Proponents of deconstruction argue that it is impossible to describe anger without entering into the world of language. Anger, then, would not fall outside of textuality.

But Don’t Misunderstand Others proponents of deconstruction would argue that the experience of emotion is already `differential' (hate differentiates itself from disliking, love, etc.). Or take the rain as it touches your face: it does so within a field of associations and differentiations.

But Don’t Misunderstand That would be especially true if this was the rain that broke the drought, or the rain that rekindled the most magnificent memory of my life: meeting the person I love in a rain that felt very much like this one.

But Don’t Misunderstand THIS RAIN RAINS MEANING but it is meaning- being and being-meaning!

But Don’t Misunderstand it depends on how you look at it, and that depends on your...

But Don’t Misunderstand relation to it at the moment.

Differance A STEP FURTHER

However, such an explanation can tend to foster the mistaken — according to Derrida — suggestion that there is some kind of 'rain' in itself that I am, however, unable to experience except in the world of language and meaning.

A STEP FURTHER This too remains a deconstructible way of talking. It projects an 'original' world we believe we cannot access, trapped as we are in some prison of language.

A STEP FURTHER Any noun- like experience is temporary.

A STEP FURTHER RF: It always deframes itself and gives way to the verb like experience of life that is relational as one moves into the other.

A STEP FURTHER When we stop thinking of the one that breaks down and gives way to the other, we begin to read and live and breathe relationally.

A STEP FURTHER From one perspective the autonomous one exists in its utopian self- enclosure. But from another perspective, all there is ramps up or down in faster or slower rates of relational movement. And in the slower rates, the illusion of one.

A STEP FURTHER When we discuss atoms, cells, chemicals, DNA, we are more and more on Derrida’s terrain, argue such theorists like Christopher Norris, Christopher Johnson and Elizabeth Wilson

A STEP FURTHER The Derridean Text. The interconnections of atoms, or cells, or chemicals, or gene coding involve systems in which relational differences circulate whose spatiality and temporality, the spacing and connections and breaches between combinations and substitutions amount to energy, life, species, materiality, disposition, emotion.

A STEP FURTHER The Derridean Text. When we are inserted into another network the "same" has the potential to become different because it is modified by the next element. It was never one to begin with, merely previously modified. Now it is modified differently – produced through a different relation.

A STEP FURTHER The Derridean Text. Christopher Johnson argues that 'in genetic technology, alterations in the DNA of a cell are obtained by means of the splicing and grafting of sequences of the genetic code, and this recombination of sequences can serve to modify aspects of metabolism or anatomical structure'

A STEP FURTHER The Derridean Text. So we are where we where, but with a difference!

A STEP FURTHER The Derridean Text. In the essay "Différance" Derrida indicates that différance gestures at a number of heterogeneous features which govern the production of textual meaning. He argues that there is deferral: the notion that words and signs can only be defined through appeal to additional words, from which they differ. This produces relation and deferral into an endless chain of signifiers.

A STEP FURTHER The Derridean Text. Thus Difference is a word and is not a word. Difference is a concept and is not a concept. Difference is a thing or is not a thing. If all is difference from itself and the other, then nothing is X or Y except in its ability to shift and alter X or Y. But, at the level of conceptual closure, we need X to be posited as x or would could not conceptualize it.

A STEP FURTHER The Derridean Text. Self-enclosed utopian categories are necessary if we are to think, to speak, to write, to converse, to share meaning. We need such necessary fictions.

A STEP FURTHER The Derridean Text. That is the dilemma of deconstruction: it must admit the metaphysical world even as it slides past it. Without it, we could never speak. In the end, we agree to speak about a figment that is ever shifting. Let the figment be a figment, and let speech and thought and writing agree to speak about it. Just don’t take it for itself...

A STEP FURTHER The Derridean Text. At every turn in the bend...

A STEP FURTHER The Derridean Text. IF I REDUCE YOU TO YOU, THEN I REDUCE YOU TO WHO YOU WERE WHEN YOU WERE 2 AND WHO YOU WILL BE WHEN YOU ARE 102 [IF YOU LIVE THAT LONG]. THAT IS THE REDUCTION INVOLVED IN DERRIDA’S PREMISE.

A STEP FURTHER The Derridean Text. You are you, but you are not you. This should make its own kind of sense.

A STEP FURTHER YOUR DECONSTRUCTIVE PARTNER SAYS TO YOU, “YOU ARE NOT YOU AND I AM NOT I, BUT WE WILL AGREE THAT YOU ARE YOU AND I AM I OR WE COULD NOT SPEAK ABOUT OURSELVES!

A STEP FURTHER THAT LEAVES ROOM FOR BECOMING