Today we will do a critical postmodern reading on Jacques Derrida’s theory of Differance.
This series hasn’t been as rough as I’ve expected this far. The first few parts showed some of the classic postmodernists to be clearer and more prescient than many give them credit for.
This changes all that.
Derrida is rough going. I chose his most famous work, Differance, for today.
I couldn’t remember if I had read this before, and then I read the first paragraph.
Oh, boy. It all came flooding back. Not only had I read this, but I’d also watched a whole lecture or two on it as well.
I’m not sure it’s fair to be super critical of lack of clarity when reading a translation, but in this case, I think it’s warranted (more on that later).
Derrida and Differance
The article begins by Derrida making up a new word: differance. It is phonetically related to “defer,” meaning to be displaced in time, and it is phonetically related to “differ,” meaning to not be identical.
So what is differance?
Here’s the clearest explanation I’ve come up with after reading the opening paragraphs many, many times. Derrida wants to say that two things can only differ if there is a relationship between them for comparison. Anything that has such a relationship must have something in common.
So:
We provisionally give the name differance to this sameness which is not identical.
Derrida then starts dancing around what he means. I don’t say this to be demeaning. His whole point is that language can’t describe the thing he is getting at, so he must dance around it to give you some idea about what he wants differance to mean.
The Definition…Kind Of
To defer makes use of time, but differance is outside time. Differance produces the differences between the differences.
It isn’t a word. It isn’t a concept.
I’m going to describe differance as a “tool” or even “thought experiment” to get at Derrida’s particular form of deconstruction even though he doesn’t exactly say that.
Now I’m supposed to be doing “critical” readings of these texts, so I’ll admit this type of thing makes me feel a little funny.
On the one hand, I’m okay with being a bit loose on definitions if the only point is to perform a thought experiment. On the other hand, I fear there will be a switch at some point where we start attributing a bunch of unknowable things without argument to a term that has such nonsensical properties as “being outside time.”
So, I want to carefully keep track of that.
Spoken vs Written Language
Derrida moves on to the relationship between spoken and written language.
In French, “differance” and “difference” have the same pronunciation. He spends far too long talking about how difficult it will be to talk about this, since he’ll have to indicate verbally “with an a” each time (this paper was originally a talk given to the Societe Francaise de Philosophie).
He next spends quite a bit of time explaining some very precise etymological concerns about the word differance:
But while bringing us closer to the infinitive and active core of differing, “differance” with an a neutralizes what the infinitive denotes as simply active, in the same way that “parlance” does not signify the simple fact of speaking, of speaking to or being spoken to.
This type of thing is a pretty silly game.
He freaking made the word up! There is no etymology or historical context to analyze. It’s pure fiction about the word.
I hear the Derrida defenders here saying that this is precisely the point because every word is made up and we play an etymological game to understand them.
Maybe, but I don’t really see what’s gained by presenting that idea in this way.
Structuralism
Derrida then recaps some of Saussure’s structuralist ideas about language: the signifier / signified distinction. The word “chair” is a mere symbol that signifies an actual chair.
The connection is arbitrary. We could easily make up a word like “cuilhseitornf” and have it symbolize the exact same thing. (All that was the Saussure recap).
Derrida wants to now say that actually it’s not so simple as Saussure thinks.
Words don’t have a one-to-one correspondence to things (concepts, etc). In fact, meaning comes from being in a linguistic system, and the meaning of a word comes from understanding what the other words are not signifying.
He wants to call this negative space “differance.” Again, I’m worried about how much we’re loading into this one made-up word.
But overall, if I clarify this point to a degree Derrida would probably hate, I’m somewhat sold on the concept.
Clarification
Think about removing the word “chair” from the English language (i.e. a linguistic system). If you think about something that is different from all the remaining words, you’ll probably get something close to “chair,” because it’s partly defined by the differences between it and all the other words in the system.
This seems an okay statement to make, if a little confusing as to its importance to theory.
Derrida introduces the concept of “trace” to make the above point. Basically, the trace of a signifier is the collection of all the sameness and differance left on it by the other words in the linguistic system.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I don’t get what real contribution this paper makes. To me, it is essentially a reiteration of Wittgenstein’s ideas about words in linguistic systems/games with a single, seemingly unnecessary, mystical layer that comes through the meta-concept of “differance.”
Maybe if I were to read some of Derrida’s later work, it will become clearer why he needs this, but at this point, I don’t get it.
Derrida is less confusing than I remember. He’s not hard to read because of obscurity or complex sentences or big words. He’s hard to read because he just meanders too much.
There are entire pages that can be thrown out with nothing lost because they are a pure reiteration of minor tangential points.
