Différance
John Phillips
30/10/06
The Same
The easiest way into an understanding of différance is (paradoxically)
through the concept of the same. The notion of the same concerns a
problem with identity, ideality, and concept. In an article called “Plato's
Pharmacy,” from Dissemination, Derrida provides a commentary on the law
that governs the truth of the eidos (Plato’s word for the idea). If this
reading concerns the specifically Socratic version of the law (from The
Crito) it can nonetheless easily be generalized. According to The Crito
the most worthy object of the philosophical dialogue is:
the truth of eidos as
that which is identical to itself, always the same as itself and always simple,
eidos , undecomposable, invariable. The eidos is that which can
always be repeated as the same. The ideality and invisibility of the eidos
are its power-to-be-repeated. Now, law is always a law of repetition, and
repetition is always submission to a law (D 125)
A bit later on it turns
out that this law of repetition (already paradoxical in the last sentence)
involves a double participation in which the two parts (e.g., body and soul)
are related to each other not through their being separate but by the one
referring back to the other as a repetition of the same. This is a law that
governs the relationship between writing and idea: “This double participation,
once again, does not mix together two previously separate elements; it refers
back to a same that is not the identical, to the common element or
medium of any dissociation” (D 127).
The law can be outlined
as follows: if there is repetition there is sameness, and there is only
repetition if it is of the same, but the repetition of the same can never be identical.
This dissociation of the same from itself is the principle which governs the
identity of the idea (its ideality and invisibility). The idea must be able to
be repeated in order for it to always be the same idea. But the principle and
the medium of this dissociation and repetition of the same just is writing.
(Thus Derrida is led to call everything writing). Elsewhere, in “Signature,
Event, Context” and in “Mes Chances” particularly, the law of repetition is
developed as the iterability of the written mark. The identifiability of the
mark in its repetition and its differentiality is what allows it to hop about
from context to context (in fact condemns it to perpetual hopping about). So
the same in Derrida is a combination of identity and difference governed
by a simultaneous repeatability and differentiality.
Différance
Différance is a term that Derrida
coins on the basis of a pun that the French language makes possible. An
understanding of this term is helpful because it can explain a lot about Derrida’s
apparently “mischievous” playing with language and ideas. I put “mischievous”
in quotation marks because many people have misunderstood the powerful
implications of his witty strategy. The pun is possible because in French the
word différer can mean either to differ or to defer, depending on
context. Différence can mean to differ from something or to defer
something.
If I was comparing two
different objects of the same generic type (this hat is different from this
one) I’d use différer just as I would if I was putting off an
appointment (let's defer it until a time when we’ll both be free). The one,
take note, implies spatiality (difference), the other implies temporality
(deferral). What Derrida is asking us to do is to combine both, normally
mutually exclusive, meanings in the one new term différance. Because the
term has passed into the English language (at least in theoretical registers)
I’ll not be maintaining the italicised and accented French form from now on.
The pun involves the use of the little letter “a.” The French différence might
mean either difference or deferral. Derrida’s new term, spelt with an “a”
instead of an “e,” should be taken to mean both difference and deferral
simultaneously. The first part of the pun we can call the performative--or
auto-referential--aspect. What this means is that by both differing from itself
(it means two different things at once) and deferring until infinity any final
meaning (it cannot at any one time mean both differ and defer) the word itself
is a performance of its meaning. Differance just is what differance means. The
second part of the pun involves the fact that Derrida’s misspelling is only
noticeable when the word is written. Saying différence and différance
makes no difference in French, it is pronounced the same way with or without
the alteration. What this brings to our attention is the difference between
phoneme (audible mark) and grapheme (written, visible mark) and a certain
imperceptibility of the difference. It is this imperceptible difference that
Derrida is using, in his “Differance” article, to draw our attention to the
permanently absent, inaudible and invisible trace.
So we can say that Differance
is the word that Derrida coins to describe and perform the way in which any
single meaning of a concept or text arises only by the effacement of other
possible meanings, which are themselves only deferred, left over, for their
possible activation in other contexts. Differance thus both describes
and performs the situation, or the conditions, under which all identities and
meanings can occur--so that any text can be repeated in an infinite number of
possible contexts for an infinite number of potential but undetermined
addressees. It is a powerful modification of the ordinary notions of identity
and difference. We need to explore this logic further.
Difference a priori
Let me put the implications of the differance argument into a formulation: It
is possible to speak of things, words and concepts because it is not possible
to present the absence that differance (which is supposedly neither a word nor
a concept) designates. Absence = difference a priori = the condition of
being different of all possible differences. I called this, under the rubric of
the “same,” differentiality. Derrida claims that this is not the same as the
differences between letters. It is not the same as the difference between
grapheme and phoneme. Nor is it the difference between word and concept. Rather
he says that it is the vehicle of all those differences. But because such an a
priori difference/absence can only be named by a word that is itself subject to
the effects of differentiality that it is trying to name, then differance is
precisely both a word and concept designating its own condition of possibility (and
impossibility).
When reading Derrida it
is useful to get a sense early on of what he is trying to say. The first thing
to come to terms with is the fact that what he is trying to say cannot in any
ordinary sense be said. To say the unsayable is impossible. However the general
message is that without this missing unsayable thing--there would be nothing to
say at all ever and no possibility of saying it anyway. This is the possibility
that Derrida calls (with characteristic perversity but also for very good
historical reasons) writing. The Derridean process can be made visible however.
A commentary on “Différance”
The
following paragraphs will present a commentary and a reading of the opening
remarks to the essay just called “Différance.” Here’s a clue: unless you can
see that there is something permanently and necessarily missing from your
understanding you’ll be missing something important. If you need something to
hold onto you could do worse than think through the implications of what
Derrida has to say for the concept of identity. Identity is conventionally
opposed to the concept of difference. But the opposition can take contrasting
forms. Identity can be considered as an essential and integrated unity (my
identity involves my name, my status, the colour of my hair and the number of
my fingers, among many other things). The idea of a unity broken into
differences is one possible traditional idea. Another one would be the idea of
an identity which then would be contrasted to other identities as its differences
(and for which it too would be different). I am different from my colleagues,
my students, my family and friends and my enemies. Any notion of difference
(whether subordinated to unity or subordinated to identity) is always a
difference subordinated, in fact, to some notion of presence (present at the
origin or a present identity). Even the notion of an absent presence (someone
or something was indeed here once but now they are gone) is subordinated to the
concept of presence (if only the having been or will one day be--in the case of
the Messiah and Mr. or Mrs. Right). The whole notion of being is in fact subordinated to the concept of presence (what has
been, is now, or will one day be, present adds up to Being as a whole,
according to the traditional assumptions). The arguments concerning Derrida’s
made-up word différance show, however, that without a notion of absolute
absence--a negative that must be logically prior to any presence whatsoever
(like God, certainly, but nothing actually)--there would neither be presence
nor absence as we experience them. It is easy to demonstrate with language, but
the implications reach far into the ethical, political and practical realms of
intellectual life.
As we have seen, the
identity that is made possible by différance (as repeatability and
differentiality combined) is the same but not identical. Neither
repeatability nor differentiality (not simply differentiation, which is easy to
think) can be made present (to thought or to senses). The absent insignificant
trace is the mark of a difference a priori. Difference before unity, before
identity. Unless we can learn to read the necessity of this a priori absent,
insignificant difference, Derrida’s writing will remain bewildering. But this
is not because Derrida is a muddled writer. To the contrary. Each sentence
illustrates, through a witty play with the French word differer, a
silent, insignificant, non-existent, unnoticeable aspect that nonetheless makes
it possible to play in the first place. Without this ( ) it will turn out that
nothing could have been possible in the first place. In other words, what
“différance” names are the conditions that make it possible to play with French
words like difference (or any word at all and thus any concept).
The first full paragraph
sets out the main aspects of the argument in a way that is as systematic as it
could possibly be. I will follow the
translation by Alan Bass from Margins of Philosophy because it is more
sensitive to the precise philosophical and colloquial nuances that Derrida
exploits. The paper was originally given as a talk and the relation between
talking (phonemic sound) and writing (graphematic traces) is a key relation for
the argument. In the spoken version of the paper Derrida begins by promising to
speak of something . . . “I will speak, then, of a letter, the first one, if we
are to believe the alphabet and most of the speculations that have concerned
themselves with it.” The first letter of the alphabet, the letter “a” and the alpha
of the Greeks, has a special place in the tradition. It is supposed to be the
original letter of writing, the first written mark. What luck that it is this
letter that performs the punning effect that Derrida has found! This is an
important point--it is just luck and not anything grand or mysterious, as we’ll
see. At this stage we should be aware
that this something (the letter “A”) might be more obscure than we’d have
imagined. Surely it is the most obvious and evident thing, a simple letter. But
consider this: are we talking about the sound we make when voicing the letter
“a” or are we talking about the visible inscription of the mark? They are two
quite different things as we know and related to each other only by virtue of
deep seated historical and conventional usage (repetition). The relation has
chance at its basis. Yet it is a promise to speak (in phonemes) about a written
letter (a grapheme).
Have a look at the next
sentence:
I will speak, therefore,
of the letter a, this initial letter which it has apparently been necessary to
insinuate, here and there, into the writing of the word “difference”; and to do
so in the course of a writing on writing, and also of a writing within writing
whose different trajectories thereby find themselves, at certain very determined
points, intersecting with a kind of gross spelling mistake, a lapse in the
discipline and law which regulate writing and keep it seemly.
This sentence is yet more systematic in its
idiomatic French of course but différance also names the possibility of this
less than perfect translation. This sentence which begins by promising speech
on writing goes on in its main clause to set out what is at stake. This is
important and each section of “Différance” will return to it. It is the
relationship between at least two forces that will later on come to
characterize the so called play of forces (a writing on writing and a writing
within writing). On the one hand there is a writing that regulates and on the
other there is a writing (a writing that is both on and in writing) that
apparently capitalizes on the possibility of accidents (lapses, mistakes).
Différance represents this play in its insinuation of the letter “a” where it
does not belong. The naughty “a” is a meeting point between two forces: a
writing that regulates through the application of discipline, law and
convention and a writing that reveals the accidental, the chance, the mistake,
as a necessary possibility (for all writing whatsoever). This possibility is
undoubtedly one of the key aspects.
The next sentence is as
follows:
One can always, de facto
or de jure, erase or reduce this lapse in spelling, and find it (according to
situations to be analyzed each time, although amounting to the same), grave or
unseemly, that is, to follow the most ingenuous hypothesis, amusing.
What is always possible? Correction or
trivialisation (especially in this case!). It is after all just a joke. No good
trying to make a mystery of this little letter. It just happens to be the first
letter of the alphabet. All the different effects of the play on différer are
just accidental. They are trivial. It is always possible to correct the mistake
or to laugh it off as a joke. (Freud would have pricked up his ears here).
Notice the parenthesis has already introduced the topic of the same as
differences in repetition; all the finite particulars adding up incessantly to
repetitions of each other. Is this what is so scandalous about
"Différance"? There is nothing
special or important about it at all. It is a comic play with language. It
names nothing but the possibility of comic plays with language. But this
possibility, as Derrida hints in the next sentence, in its silence and its
trivial insignificance, just is possibility. Let's take another look:
Thus, even if one seeks to
pass over such an infraction in silence [you recognise what this is a parodic
repetition of], the interest that one takes in it can be recognised and
situated in advance as prescribed by the mute irony, the inaudible
misplacement, of this literal permutation.
Let's reconstitute the sentence that this last
sentence ironically inscribes within itself: “what we cannot speak about we
must pass over in silence.” The famous and often quoted final proposition from
Wittgenstein's Tractatus. It's a joke again, of course, and refers us to
the first words of the talk (repeated again at the start of the paragraph). “I
will speak . . .,” but that which Derrida will speak about cannot be spoken. It
is the mute “a” that occurs only for vision as an accidental effect of
the graphematic mark (but not the phonetic one). I will speak about what we
cannot speak about. But that is not just a joke. That is the topic of the essay
and the aspect of it that we find Derrida worrying away at in much more recent
works like Specters of Marx, "The Force of Law" and The
Gift of Death. The word-concept “differance” is an attempt to reveal the
kind of thing that is made possible by what cannot be spoken about.
A little later, Derrida
anticipates an objection. Let's have a slow patient look at the summing up
section of the paragraph preceding “it will be objected”:
the play of difference,
which, as Saussure reminded us, is the condition for the possibility and
functioning of every sign, is in itself a silent play. Inaudible is the difference between two
phonemes which alone permits them to be and to operate as such. The inaudible
opens up the apprehension of two present phonemes such as they present
themselves. If there is no purely phonetic writing, it is that there is no
purely phonetic phone. The difference which establishes phonemes and
lets them be heard remains in and of itself inaudible, in every sense of the
word.
Phonemes operate as differentiated sounds because
of an inaudible element that comes between them as the difference between them.
The difference is inaudible (no possibility of anybody ever hearing it). What
Derrida is trying to do here is to draw attention to the function of the
inaudible as difference and to show why the inaudible difference that makes it
possible to distinguish between two different sounds cannot be reduced to any
present sound whatsoever. This inaudible difference must be possible a
priori as the possibility of all the empirical differences, the apparent
differences between sensible experiences of sound. Derrida's proof of this has
just been rather simple. When you write phonetically you must incorporate lots
of marks (punctuation etc.) that are not phonetic. These are graphic (and we
are back with the difference between phoneme and grapheme). That is precisely
the concern of the potential objection. Let's have a look:
It will be objected, for
the same reasons, that graphic difference itself vanishes into the night, can
never be sensed as a full term, but rather extends an invisible relationship,
the mark of an inapparent relationship between two spectacles.
Derrida has just about reached the point where he
has said everything he needs to say. The graphic play does, certainly, act as a
kind of revenge against the primacy of speech in all those texts he has already
looked at. But the implications are greater. Speech is not now to be simply
replaced by writing (sound is not going to simply be replaced by graphic
marks). No. Difference eludes both hearing and vision. No one has ever been
able to see or to hear a difference as such. The objection--but writing depends
on invisible differences too--in fact anticipates by repeating a generally
acknowledged truism about writing in so far as it pertains to speech too (which
even then in the 1960s was not generally acknowledged). Derrida is not
privileging writing now over speech but showing that the conditions that apply
to the one apply to other just as much. As we’re just about to find out,
furthermore, the conditions in question constitute the very relationship
between speech and writing per se.
So here is the argument
so far. Différance, with its peculiar, inaudible, illegal “a,” refers us to
that which cannot be spoken--inaudible difference as such without which there
would be no differences for our experience (and no spoken language). But for
all the reasons that have been given it will be objected that this applies to
graphic difference too. Well yes it does:
Doubtless. But, from this
point of view, that the difference marked in the differ( )nce between the e and
the a eludes both vision and hearing perhaps happily suggests that here we must
be permitted to refer to an order which no longer belongs to sensibility.
It is the inaudible. It is the blank. This is
what Differance is about. It is about nothing else. But at this stage the
stakes are in one move raised (a move almost identical to what has just gone
before):
But neither can it belong
to intelligibility, to the ideality which is not fortuitously affiliated with
the objectivity of theorein or understanding. Here, therefore, we must
let ourselves refer to an order that resists the opposition, one of the
founding oppositions of philosophy, between the sensible and the intelligible.
The move that disrupts the stable hierarchy of
speech and writing is now repeated in a way that disrupts the hierarchy of
ideality and sensibility. What this means is that the inaudible aspect that
makes speech possible and its relation to the invisible aspect that makes
writing possible is the same as the invisible/inaudible aspect that makes
perceptions and conceptions (intuitions, images, ideas and thoughts) possible
too. A series of affiliations are evoked, which repeat another series:
form + matter signified
+ signifier
concept + word sound
+ vision
mind + body speech
+ writing
intelligible + sensible phoneme
+ grapheme
The translator, Alan Bass, adds a footnote here
that may be quite useful. He says:
A play of words has been lost
in translation here, a loss that makes this sentence difficult to understand.
In the previous sentence Derrida says that the difference between the e and the
a of difference/différance can neither be seen nor heard. It is not a
sensible--that is, relating to the senses--difference. But, he goes on to
explain, neither is this an intelligible difference, for the very names by
which we conceive of objective intelligibility are already in complicity with
sensibility. Theorein--the Greek origin of “theory”--literally means “to look
at,” to see; and the word that Derrida uses for “understanding” here is entendement,
the noun form of entendre, to hear.
This is not, of course, to suggests the order of
différance (inaudible, invisible difference) cannot be intelligible because
of these untranslatable semantic or literal affiliations (theory =
seeing/understanding = hearing).
Derrida's point is in fact much more devastating. The “order that resists these oppositions”
does so because “it transports them.”
Différance refers to that which is neither sensible nor intelligible
because 1) it cannot be seen or heard (or tasted or smelled or felt); and 2) it
cannot be thought, understood, theorized, made the object of an empirical
science, analyzed transcendentally either. But you would have no sensible
experience and no thought whatsoever without the differentiating différance
that can be neither sensed nor thought. That's the argument. And we're only on
the third page.
To sum up: there are
always at least two writings, one within and on the other. The one regulates,
disciplines and forces its way by convention and rule. The other plays, gives
rise to mistakes, accidents, jokes, puns and witty manipulations. The absent (
) of Differ( )nce reveals that the possibility of the latter is necessary for
the former. A correction, a trivialisation, a passing by in silence is always
possible in the face of such accidents basically because such accidents (and
such silences) must always be possible.
The order of this differ(
)nce is inaudible, invisible, unthinkable but its effects are always on each
occasion among us. Traditionally this order would be something like God. But
différance is an example of these necessary effects and does not itself escape
them. Is Derrida replacing the divine being (or just being as opposed to beings) with the possibility of accidents?
Could be. But then everything changes. There is an unthinkable, invisible,
inaudible trace without which there would be no differentiation. That is the
argument. Différance attempts to think it, to make it visible, something that
one can hear. And it fails to do this. But its failure does illustrate its
necessity. It's a paradoxical ground.
What to Look for
In the
“Différance” essay there are a series of repetitions each involving the
following characteristics:
Performance: Différance designates
the effects that it is itself effected by. The word-concept that explains the
possibility of all words-concepts cannot escape the effects it designates. Theological
word/concepts, on the other hand, are supposed to be able to escape the effects
that they make possible. Différance is a self-dramatization.
Delay
After-effects that must be presupposed not before the discourse as such but as
after-effect that retrospectively has to be presupposed. A secondariness that
then has to be presupposed as being necessary a priori, that is before any
postulated beginning. The “thing” (concept, referent) precedes the sign. But
the differentiality and repeatability of the sign precedes the presence of the
“thing” (concept, referent).
Repetitions of the same
Couples
of a certain kind (body/soul, word/concept, grapheme/phoneme,
signifier/signified) generally have hanging off them a third, hardly
significant aspect, that is as it were added to the binary coupling but which
turns out to be the very principle of the coupling itself (in this instance,
writing). The formula is as follows: (concept + speech) + writing = writing +
writing (governed by repeatability and differentiality). The secondariness of
writing is as it were doubly secondary (tertiary?).
The Law of Repetition
You know
this one from my section about “the same.”
Deconstruction
Deconstruction
is the term that has been used to describe Derrida’s “method.” If we accept
this provisionally as an acceptable usage (we will qualify it later) we must
take note of some important features. Like all Derrida’s terms it has two
mutually exclusive (and contradictory) meanings: to destroy/construct.
Deconstruction does intuitively sound like a form of destruction, of taking
apart, perhaps, of undoing some construction. Many people have agreed that some
deconstruction (thought of in this way) was necessary--the totalizing projects
of western metaphysics, the ethical, aesthetic, epistemological projects of
post-enlightenment science, the imperialism of European countries as they
carved out their empires throughout the colonised world, the great patriarchal
domination over women--all of these structures and institutions, people agree,
need to be taken down to their foundations in order to expose their
contradictory logic. But now, the argument goes, we need some reconstruction.
We need to put things together again in some new, more democratic order.
However this consoling sense of reconstruction is anathema to any rigorous
sense of deconstruction. Deconstruction actually names the impossibility of
setting up “perfect” or “ideal” structures. That which cannot be presented to
conceptualization or perception takes its determination from things like the
future and from the radical alterity of the other (which in its permanent
absence guarantees the particularity of all of us finite particulars). No law
could be set up to take that into its consideration--that is the very condition
of the law. So deconstruction names something rather more tricky. It names the
conditions according to which it is possible for events to occur. We have seen
at the beginning of this chapter that Derrida has seized upon the word “event”
in the work of Levi-Strauss and his reading of Levi-Strauss affirms the radical
alterity, the “something missing,” that Levi-Strauss’s peculiar ethnology makes
possible. In other words, in order for structuralism to have been an event at
all (something surprising, unpredictable, that eludes the conceptualizations of
existing orders), it was necessary to find this “negative” space. There is no
escape from the “odds and ends” (as Levi-Strauss puts it) that make up a
cultural inheritance and, more determinedly, the historicity of metaphysical
oppositions, but one can open up this space (alterity, futurity, negativity) in
such a way that an event is welcomed and the law, the institution, the
structure, the whole conceptual apparatus, undergoes a change. So
deconstruction is never the closing down of one institution in order to set up
another in its place. Rather it is the persistent opening up of institutions to
their own alterity, towards which they are hopefully forced to adapt.
Deconstruction names the conditions upon which it is possible for things to
change. If there is a strategy, or a method to deconstruction then it would
involve opening boundaries up to an alterity--almost literally making a
negative space--that welcomes the surprise of future events. It is thus
concerned with making or allowing things to happen. The triumphal part of the
structuralist project, hinting at its escape from the bounds of metaphysical
thought, is treated with extreme vigilance by Derrida for, as we have seen, the
metaphysics tends to rush back in just when you’re least expecting it (the
engineer-god as origin of his own language!).
So the non-present space
of possibility cannot ever be made present as such--otherwise nothing would
happen. But deconstruction has become a kind of strategy (or a number of
strategies occurring among many domains and dimensions) for outlining such a
space.