Derrida’s Différance

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on August 1, 2024

In Of Grammatology, his first major work, Derrida presents deconstruction as a critical reading of texts which brings to light what is already at work in the texts he deconstructs. But through his intervention we see the text differently. He discusses the frequently conflicting relationship between an author’s expressed intentions – or the ‘declared’ level of the text – and what the text actually ‘describes’ (demonstrates or does). He pays attention to ambivalent ideas within a text which are inconsistent with its overt statements. For that reason, deconstruction is not mere commentary, redoubling or reproduction. The text’s ‘declarations’ are its own account of what it considers high and low, original and degraded. Deconstruction brings to light suppressed textual conflicts concerning what is ideal, primary or original and what is degradation or insufficiency. To overtly juxtapose a text’s declared and described levels is to produce a different text.

Of Grammatology is a work that spans several different disciplines: linguistics, anthropology, and the history of philosophy, and includes transformative readings of Rousseau, the turn-of-the-century linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, and the twentieth-century anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. These writers belong to different disciplines, and to different historical periods. As a result, Of Grammatology seems an eclectic, fragmented, multi-disciplinary work, but its themes interrelate. Derrida focuses on the hierarchies between speech and writing; and nature and culture in these different writers. He asks how we should read these hierarchies. We have already seen that early work by Derrida also requires us to come to terms with the classical texts he is reading: confronting not just Derrida, but Derrida and Plato, for example. Similarly, an important Derridean term, différance, arises from his appropriation of Saussure’s concept of the ‘sign’. In addition to his strategy of reversal, Derrida finds or invents new concepts that can’t be contained within overturned hierarchical oppositions. Différance is one of these terms. In relation to the opposition between ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ différance is neither present, nor absent. Instead, it is a kind of absence that generates the effect of presence. It is neither identity, nor difference. Instead, it is a kind of differentiation that produces the effect of identity and of difference between those identities.

In his Course in General Linguistics, Saussure observed the way a language was a system of elements he termed signs. The meaning of each sign appears to be ‘present’; in fact it is not. He argued that meaning was produced through the relationship between signs. A sign – ‘dog’ – may seem to represent an animate being, a four-legged animal now running in my backyard. But if we consult its meaning in the dictionary, we will be directed to other meanings, and from those we will be similarly re-directed. My dictionary tells me that a dog is a quadruped of many breeds, wild and domesticated. It thereby defers the definition, directing me to further consult the meanings for quadruped, breed, wild and domesticated. Their definitions would in turn require others. Moreover, my dictionary tells me of many ideas with which the dog is associated: the worthless or surly person, astronomical constellations; it gives me a list of colloquial expressions such as ‘every dog will have its day’; it reminds me of dogs in mangers, dogs in blankets, dogfish and dog-faced baboons. The meaning of the dog is suspended differentially across such associations, and never quite settles.

Meaning, Saussure concluded, is never fully, or finally, present. For this reason, he argued that with signs, ‘we discover not ideas given in advance but values emanating from the [linguistic] system … [T]hese concepts are purely differential, not positively defined by their content but negatively defined by their relations with other terms of the system. Their most precise characteristic is that they are what the others are not’ (Saussure 1974, 117). Saussure’s Course was extremely influential in many areas of French thought – among them psychoanalysis, anthropology and film theory.

Reiterating Saussure’s theory, Derrida commented that ‘the first consequence to be drawn from this is that the signified concept is never present in and of itself, in a sufficient presence that would refer only to itself … every concept is inscribed in a chain or in a system within which it refers to the other, to other concepts, by means of the systematic play of differences’ (Derrida 1982A, 11). Derrida elaborates that the meaning of any apparently ‘present’ sign is nothing but the relationship between all the absent meanings that the term is not. The play of relational, differentiating linguistic value between all the absent terms is at work in any sign whose meaning we seem able to isolate. A sign is not autonomous of the network of alternative and combinatory elements from which it is derived. It is a false abstraction to lift a term ‘dog’ out of that system, and think that its meaning can be dissociated from the latter. Instead, the meaning of dog is a relational play with many absent possibilities that ‘ghost’ the meaning in question. The meaning of the dog is an endless play between associated alternatives. What is a dog? It is ‘not’ exactly some other dog-ideas it might have been – hound, puppy or cur. Not exactly other sounds it might have been – a ‘hog’ or ‘log’. Not exactly other pets it might have been – a cat or a bird. It is not exactly other non-literal usages it might have been – the hangover cure, the sleeping trouble we choose to ignore. Its meaning is produced through an infinite differentiation from possible alternatives. Derrida agrees that the meaning of the sign ‘dog’ is never definitively present. Instead its meaning arises in the connections between the associations and imagined substitutions of countless kinds – that is, sounds, different pets, breeds, metaphors.

In general, difference is often conceived as the difference between two purported identities: black and white, east and west, good and bad, man and woman, etc. In common speech, we refer to the ‘difference between’ this and that. Derrida invents the term différance to refer to the alternative understanding of difference just discussed: 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.

‘Différance’ (from the verb différer, meaning both to differ and to defer) is a Derridean neologism referring to a differentiation which he also terms ‘spacing’, and which prevents any sign from having a self-enclosed identity. Différance 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’.

Although it was developed from an amplified Saussurean theory, the Derridean term ‘différance’ played a role in his deconstruction of Saussure’s own work. Even in the work of Saussure, the hierarchy of speech over writing reoccurs. He devalues writing as a sign system whose sole purpose is to represent speech, arguing that the proper study of linguistics ought to focus on spoken forms of language. He considered writing an ‘unnatural’ linguistic object because it is merely the ‘figuration’ of speech.

The pejorative use of ‘unnatural’ to devalue writing is surprising, since Saussure argued of spoken signs that there was a ‘non-natural’ connection between signified content (concepts, such as the idea of a dog) and their signifiers (acoustic sound images, such as the sounds d-o-g). Insofar as the signifier and signified form that unity called a sign, Saussure argued, they have an ‘arbitrary’ relationship. He meant by this that there is no natural unity between d-o-g and the concept dog.

Derrida questions Saussure’s devaluation of written signs as mere ‘signs of signs’ (signs of acoustic signs). Through a deconstructive reading he expands and generalizes the category we could refer to as ‘signs of signs’: ‘Writing is not a sign of a sign, except if one says it of all signs, which would be more profoundly true. If every sign refers to a sign, and if “sign of a sign” signifies writing, certain conclusions – which I shall consider at the appropriate moment – will become inevitable’ (Derrida 1997B, 43). Derrida rightly points out that although Saussure, to describe writing, uses the notion of ‘sign of a sign’ in a literal and pejorative sense (he probably means ‘mere secondary copy’), Saussure has effectively also offered a much more broad and generalizing definition of signs as always signs of signs of signs of signs. Derrida argues that if Saussure so defines literal writing, all signs could be considered a generalized form of writing.

Texts – including Saussure’s Course, a posthumously published reconstruction of his lectures – are often riddled with unstable hierarchies effecting fictions of presence, originality or naturality, as when Saussure associates the spoken with what is ‘natural’ in linguistics. Unexpectedly, given his view that their effects of presence arise from infinite differentiation, even Saussure had suggested spoken signs were original. Derrida points out the inconsistencies of this argument and suggests that it deconstructs itself.

Derrida’s emphasis that every sign leads to a sign permits him to conclude, in the passage above with the famous statement 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. He generalizes the term, and he suggests the alternative definition of ‘text’: a heterogeneous, differential and open field of forces (Derrida 1986A, 167–8).

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. Unlike the traditional questions asked in philosophy, Derrida switches his philosophical game. Rather than asking ‘what is there?’, Derrida interrogates the tangles in which we become entwined when we ask what there is. We tend to project something original, which is subsequently known, represented or hypothesized by us. Origins, as we depict them, are always already enmeshed in language. They are relational (that is to say, they are depicted in relation with what supposedly comes after them, or represents them, or approximates them), and they are rhetorically rendered. In other words, our way of talking about origins, and about what is secondary to them, produces the ‘effect’ that there seems to be an origin. Like the sign ‘dog’, ‘origin’ is the effect of the movement of différance, of deferred and ‘differentiated’ meaning: the plays of language that project their supposedly original moment. Derrida could be considered indifferent to the question of ‘what is there’ in favour of ‘how do we depict what there is?’ For Derrida, origins are always depicted textually. Even to say that Derrida ‘reserves his judgement’ about what there ‘is’ collapses somewhat into what he avoids. It involves a sly suggestion that there may or may not be a ‘beyond’ to the plays of language about which he reserves his judgement. 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.

Against the statement ‘there is nothing outside of the text’, critics erroneously respond: surely there is something outside of the text: atoms, blood, rain, trees, bodies? Derrida seems to deny ‘reality’ in favour of ‘words’. This response misunderstands the sense in which Derrida means ‘text’. Like writing, he widens its definition. ‘Text’ for Derrida is such things as différance, 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.

Consider each domain someone might select to refute the claim that there is nothing outside of the text. The critic might object to Derrida: you say there is nothing outside of the text: but what of my current emotion of anger? That isn’t a ‘text’. The debate can’t progress unless the critic recognizes what Derrida means by text. Some defend Derrida by pointing out that it is impossible to describe that anger without metaphors, linguistic meanings – we have always entered the world of language, thus the anger is not outside of textuality. Others would argue that the experience of emotion is already ‘differential’ (hate differentiates itself from disliking, love, etc.).

Similarly, some have tried to refute Derrida by mentioning the concrete materiality of a virus. One form of counter-argument points out how the scientific language of the virus is in fact highly metaphorical: viral attacks are often described with militaristic or battle imagery. This interpretation of Derrida emphasizes that we are always in the world of language, whether we refer to a virus, an emotion, the sun, the rain. We’ve never stepped out of language to touch the thing itself, according to this defence of Derrida. Even as the rain touches my face, it does so with associations and differentiations. It is the breaking of the drought, or the disaster to my clothes, or the joy of a sensation, or a marvellous memory rekindled. The rain does not fall without already being imbued with meaning for me. It cannot fall for me ‘meaninglessly’.

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. 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.

What kind of material world might appear to be called into question by Derrida’s claim that that there is nothing outside the text? Atoms, cells, chemicals, DNA, neuronal firing? Deconstructive writers on science such as Christopher Norris, Christopher Johnson and Elizabeth Wilson point out that we are not far from Derrida’s definition of ‘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. Johnson shows the parallel between Derrida’s point that ‘once inserted into another network the “same” philosopheme is no longer the same’ (Derrida 1981B, 3) and the operation of genetic material: ‘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’ (Johnson 1993, 182). Rather than denying materiality, Derrida’s argument that there is nothing outside the text stresses the importance of différance to materiality.

REFERENCES

Derrida, Jacques (1982A). ‘Différance’, Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Brighton, Sussex, Harvester Press: 1–27.
Derrida, Jacques (1997B). Of Grammatology. Corrected edition. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1986A). ‘But, beyond … (Open Letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon’ (trans. Peggy Kamuf). Critical Inquiry 13 (Autumn): 155–70.
Derrida, Jacques (1981B). ‘Economimesis’ (trans. Richard Klein). Diacritics 11 (2): 3–25.
Johnson, Christopher (1993). System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
Saussure, Ferdinand de (1974). A Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Wade Baskin. London, Fontana/Collins.