Derrida’s thought on “trace,” “différance,” “writing,” and “supplement” is always thought the breaking of logocentrism, the essence, the positive meaning, and the closure of the metaphysics of presence; this thinking is accordingly regarded the thinking with the fundamental structure of difference and openness. This play of differences preexist language itself which has no origin. September 7, 2017 Deconstruction / Postmodernism: Derrida’s ‘différance’, Derrida, Jacques, Gloss Slowlander In their introduction to deconstruction, Rivkin and Ryan explain that Derrida’s term ‘différance’ is a ‘primordial process of differentiation,’ a ‘simultaneous process of deferment in time and difference … This remarkable beginning sets out the philosopher’s entire enterprise, his desire to write about the writing of philosophy and to examine philosophy as writing. Without différance, there is no deconstruction, the term which has become inexorably linked to Derrida – his very own trace if you also Of Grammatology, p. 61 on the originary (non)trace as origin of the origin, as well as Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. Differance undermines the unity and coherence of a text when a deconstructive reading is performed. Unless we can learn to read the necessity of this a priori absent, insignificant difference, Derrida’s writing will remain bewildering. Such a play, difference, which is not a concept, is not simply a word, that is, what is generally represented as the calm, present, and self-referential unity of concept and phonic material..The difference of which Saussure speaks is itself, therefore, neither a concept nor a word among others..In a language, in the system of languages, there are only differences. Notice that Lévi-Strauss is thinking of language and not actual making of an object but of a process of how a discourse is constructed through found words, already-ready concepts that are reshaped linguistically within the logic of the structure. To question and to dissipate the "phonocentrism" and "logocentrism" of Western metaphysics, Jacques Derrida, through his reading of the Western philosophers, designates a new kind of practice and deconstructs this system by indicating and playing on the notions of "differance", "trace… Likewise différance is non-cognitive and has no real presence in itself; its function is to solicit or to shake language. Categories: Linguistics, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Uncategorized, Tags: aporias, Deconstruction, differance, Jacques Derrida. Because Derrida’s writing concerns auto-bio-graphy(writing about one’s life as a form of relation to oneself),many of his writings are auto-biographical. To “disperse” is a spatial operation, to “defer” is temporal, a pair of operations that is compensated for by the “a.” Therefore, différAnce is productive, constituting causality–cause and effect–différance is neither word or a concept. The late sixties and early seventies were marked by a series of career-making articles in which Derrida systematically and laboriously re-read and reinterpreted European philosophy. The trace is an important notion in Derrida’s philosophy of language because it is closely connected to the way that writing relies on differences. First, to “differ” is to be unlike, second, “differe” (Latin) is “to scatter, to disperse,” and third “to defer” is to delay and postpone. Home › Linguistics › Derrida’s Concept of Differance, By Nasrullah Mambrol on March 22, 2016 • ( 2 ). So, for instance inMonolingualism of the Other(1998), Derrida recounts how,when he was in the “lycée” (high school), the Vichyregime in France proclaimed certain interdictions concerning thenative languages of Algeria, in particular Berber. Consequently, meaning is disseminated across the text and can be found only in traces, in the unending chain of signification. He was also born into an environment of some discrimination. His use requires the spelling of différance. Trace is the absent part of the sign’s presence. This essay, given first as a talk at the Socieété française de philosophie in January of 1968, was published in the summer of the same year in Théorie d’ensemble, a Tel Quel enterprise. If you have found this material useful, please give credit to Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent. Meaning as a result is always endlessly deferred because there can be no final resting place for the sign which moves along a chain of signifiers. Derrida found “play” or oscillation between terms to be of great importance. It is, most importantly, an attempt to escape the history of metaphysics; a history that has always prioritised certai… N… The trace or what Derrida called the “arche-trace” is the formation of writing and of the difference that takes place in the sign. In 1930, Derrida was born into a Jewish family in Algiers. 23. Derrida’s thought on “trace,” “différance,” “writing,” and “supplement” is always thought the breaking of logocentrism, the essence, the positive meaning, and the closure of the metaphysics of presence; this thinking is accordingly regarded the thinking with the fundamental structure of difference and openness. Therefore like Being, the trace must be placed sous rature. Derrida also had the gift of seizing on detail and spinning out his observations into thoughts and thoughts into positions. All rights reserved. Logically, this reversal introduces the trace which exists as a force and formation of writing: the trace as an already-there precondition that precedes. In the free play of meanings, one signifier leads to a signified, which itself becomes a signifier for another signified and so on, such that the ultimate signified (the “Transcendental Signified”), that which transcends all signifiers is never attained. Some have tried to write si… [1] Differance is also the “hinge” between speech and writing, and between inner meaning and outer representation. Writing (écriture) is the name of the structure, which is already inhabited by the “trace.” This notion of the “trace” was a concept borrowed from Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), who wrote in “Note on the Mystic Writing Pad” (1925) that writing was a metaphor for workings of the psyche (or what Lévi-Strauss regarded as the unconscious structure of the mind), which an ever-receptive surface for thought that could retain a permanent trace of experiences (writing). But Derrida parted company with what he considered to be a nostalgic fixation on mythic origins. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! | Site designed by, Le Corbusier: The Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau. Jacques Derrida (trans Alan Bass, Margins of Philosophy, Chicago: ... the play of the trace, or the differance, which has no meaning and is not. The absent insignificant trace is the mark of a difference a priori. “the concept of trace is incompatible with the concept of retention, of the becoming-past of what has been present. Derrida’s concept of iterability involves the idea that every repetition is an alteration, every recurrence is a difference (this is true of identity’s A 1 and A 2). I will speak, therefore, of a letter. I want to try to answer this question by concentrating on the first part of his early book Of Grammatology(1967), which I believe is the Rosetta Stone that gives us the key to all his writings. Consequently, Derrida reversed “the crucial pair” of language, the signifier and the signified into the signified and the signifier. Laruelle believes (Laruelle 2010a) that with the philosophy of deconstruction, Derrida restores the identity of difference on a kind of meta-level. A collection of six essays by British and American philosophers, Derrida and Différance represents recent appropriations of Derrida's thought at the Warwick Workshops on Continental Philosophy. “The pure trace itself does not exist,” Derrida said, because the trace institutes the possibility of the sign–precedes the sign, is necessary for the sign. It other words, that which is to be signified (meant, expressed) must precede that a which is the signifier. Essentially and lawfully, every concept is inscribed to a chain or in a systematic play of differences. In a reversal of Lévi-Strauss, he  insisted that writing is a precondition of speech, that not only does writing or the idea of writing exist prior to speech, writing makes speech possible. With no possibility of locating a transcendental signifier or point of origin or end, Derrida has deconstructed Saussure’s system of language. To that end, Derrida pointed out that différence/différance has several meanings. The (pure) trace is differance (p. 62). A concept introduced by Derrida, differance is a pun on “difference” and “deferment”, and is that attribute of language, by which meaning is generated because of a word’s difference from other words in a signifying system, and at the same time, meaning is inevitably and infinitely deferred or postponed, is constantly under erasure and can be glimpsed only through “aporias” or deadlocks in understanding. Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. To take note of this space of deferral or absence, Derrida created the term “différance,” (mis)spelling the word with an “a” to signify that the “différance” that could not be heard only seen graphically or in writing. One cannot think the trace–and therefore, différance–on the basis of the present or the presence of the presence … since the trace is not a presence but the simulacrum of a presence.” Dr. Spivak pivots from analyzing Derrida’s vocabulary to exploring his relationship with Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger; she also explores the antagonistic relationship Derrida had with Foucault. [2] 4. One of the very many difficulties of expressing Jacques Derrida's project (deconstruction) in simple terms is the enormous scale of it. He was expelled from one school because there was a 7% limit on the Jewish population, and he later withdrew from another school on account of the anti-semitism. He takes a lead from the Swiss linguist Ferdinand Saussure (1857-1913), who maintained that words derive their meaning from other words, and that meanings work by differences not similarity. But this is not because Derrida is a muddled writer. Like Lévi-Strauss, Lacan was attached to the notion of an “origin” for human consciousness, found in the “split” that creates the social subject. Différance is typical of his poetic excess and opens with. Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Words often have opposites which, far from being independent terms, need the other to complete the definition. Jacques Derrida's theory of the sign fits into the poststructuralist movement, which runs counter to Saussurean structuralism (the legacy of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure). For example, we notice that a triangle differs from a square. His extensive study of myths implied that the bi-polar myth was universal, a rather Kantian operation of a storytelling a priori. The trace or what Derrida called the “arche-trace” is the formation of writing and of the difference that takes place in the sign. For Derrida, words leave behind a trace, which itself can never become a meaning, as it exists in différance rather than in presence. Jacques Derrida was a sort of enfant terrible of philosophy who attacked conventional thinking on the meaning (semantics) of philosophical terms. Differance has become a prominent concept in the parlance of all the major theories of the post 1960 period — Derrida’s concept of “ecriture”, Lacan’s concept of the ‘inalienable split” that inhabits the self, in its longing for the lost and unattainable wholeness, Cixous’ “ecriture feminine”, are all marked by difference, thereby giving rise to multitudes of meanings in each aspect. Derrida argues that meanings can be located only in these traces, which are what signs differ/defer from. Although the bricoleur is a hunter-gatherer of cultural ideas, one should not confuse the hunting activity with an allegorical assemblage with multiple parts. Just to understand the context of Derrida's theory, one needs to be acquainted intimately with philosophers, such as, Socrates–Plato–Aristotle, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Charles Sanders Peirce, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emmanuel Levinas, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heideggerand others. http://www.egs.edu/ Diane Davis, rhetorician and post-structuralist thinker, continues with her course on the thought of Jacques Derrida. Differance may be the condition for difference. For Derrida the play of difference made it impossible to separate speech and writing. Retaining at least the schema, if not the content, of the demand formulated by Saussure, we shall designate by the term différance the movement by which language, or any code, any system of reference in general, becomes “historically” constituted as a fabric of differences. While Derrida woul… I will speak of the letter a, this initial letter which it apparently has 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 writhing, 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. The “surface” of the human mind is the unconscious, once a virgin surface, which retains permanent traces, or memory which can be energized into consciousness and affect the thinking subject. The “a” is silent in speech, and, according to Derrida, silent like a tomb. In considering how human beings develop ideas or discourses, Lévi-Strauss imagined or proposed the creation of culture through a cultural character inspired by his own father, a bricoleur,  a handy person, an engineer, a fabricator, who used everything at hand to create structures–myths, stories, accounts–to explain events. Saussure’s notion of différence as a spatial one–terms are laid out in a system, positioned as opposites and pairs, but Derrida deployed the “a” to make the point that différance is temporal because each sign carries within it the trace of other other. Thus, for Derrida, the sign marks an absent presence, because rather than present the object, we employ the sign whose meaning is always deferred because the thing represented is always absent. constituted difference here, but rather, before all determination of the content, of the pure movement which produces difference. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 24; cf. With writing as his basis (t… Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. Opposition of signs can be maintained only if one term is believed to be final, but because the terms are paired in difference, there can never be a final term, only be an endless play of signification. Derrida's neographism (rather than neologism because "neologism" would propose a logos, a metaphysical category; and (more simply) because, when uttered in French, "différance" is indistinguishable from "difference"—it is thus only a graphical modification, having nothing to do with a spoken logos) is, of course, not just an attempt at linguistics or to discuss written texts and how they are read. In that essay Derrida began his consideration of Hegel as the great philosophical speculator; thus all the economic metaphors of the previous sentences. That said, différence exists in what Derrida called temporization or suspended in time or temporization and in space, meaning the to express this suspension between the “becoming time of space” and the “becoming space of time.” The “a” compensates, as he said, for the resulting loss of meaning and that this compensation is “economical.” Différence, within the structure of paired opposites, is to differ, to be the other to a term, and therefore the difference is to defer, to delay, to postpone what is an endlessly deferring meaning. As soon as there is meaning, there is difference. … Nothing Outside the Text: Derrida and Brandom 49 différance which opens appearance [l’apparaître] and signification” (Derrida 1976, 65).4 The trace, for Derrida, is something that is absent but that has left its mark; the trace has effects even when it is no longer present. She surveys key Derridean vocabulary: differance, trace, the practice of putting certain terms “under erasure” (sous rature), and her interaction with the history of metaphysics. To uncover the logic of the trace, one must deconstruct a text. Derrida begins this essay by noting the slightly altered spelling of the word "difference." Derrida explains that difference is the condition for the opposition of presence and absence. TN. To counter the pervasiveness of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ in Western Philosophy – Derrida uses the neologism ‘Differance’ – a playful combination of ‘differ’ and ‘to defer’, to demonstrate that the meaning of a linguistic sign is the simultaneous operation of distinction and temporality. Derrida uses the Delivered a year after his interrogation of Claude Lévi-Strauss in “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of  Human Sciences,” Différance marks his precise engagement with the father of Structuralism, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) with side forays into the philosophy of Hegel and Heidegger and Nietzche and even Freud. Retention, of the becoming-past of what has been present ” of language the... Of presence and absence the sign ’ s concept of differance by Nasrullah Mambrol on March 22, 2016 (! Which has no real presence in itself ; its function is to be signified ( meant, expressed ) precede... Difference, Derrida dealt with the consequences of the pure movement which produces difference and differance trace derrida of letter. Différance is non-cognitive and has no real presence in itself ; its function is be. Categories: Linguistics, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Uncategorized, Tags: aporias, Deconstruction,,... 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