is a French term coined by Jacques Derrida. Roughly speaking, the method of différance is a way to analyze how signs (words, symbols, metaphors, etc) come to have meanings. It suggests that meaning is not inherent in a sign but arises from its relationships with other signs, a continual process of contrasting with what comes before and later. That is, a sign acquires meaning by being different from other signs. The meaning of a sign changes over time, as new signs keep appearing and old signs keep disappearing. It is central to Derrida's concept of deconstruction, a critical outlook concerned with the relationship between text and meaning.
However, the meaning of a sign is not just determined by the system of signs present currently. Past meanings leave "traces", and possible future meanings "haunt". The meaning of a sign is determined by the interaction between past traces, future haunts, and the system of signs in the present.
Overview Derrida first uses the term in his 1963 paper ""."The economy of this writing is a regulated relationship between that which exceeds and the exceeded totality: the of the absolute excess." (Derrida, J., 1978. Cogito and the History of Madness. From Writing and Difference. Trans. A. Bass. London & New York: Routledge. p. 75.) Schultz and Fried in their vast bibliography of Derrida's work cite this sentence as where "JD introduces " for the first time. (Schultz, W.R. & Fried, L.B., 1992. Jacques Derrida Bibliography. London & New York: Garland. p. 12.) The term then played a key role in Derrida's engagement with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl in Speech and Phenomena. It was further elaborated in various other works, notably in his essay "" and in the interviews collected in Positions.See Speech and Phenomena and other essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), "". Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 1982) and Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1971).
The of is a deliberate misspelling of , though the two are pronounced identically, ( plays on the fact that the French verb means both "to defer" and "to differ"). This misspelling highlights the fact that its written form is not heard, and serves to further subvert the traditional privileging of speech over writing (see arche-writing and logocentrism), as well as the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible. The difference articulated by the in is not apparent to the senses via sound, "but neither can it belong to intelligibility, to the ideality which is not fortuitously associated with the objectivity of theorein or understanding.""", Margins of Philosophy, p. 5. This is because the language of understanding is already caught up in sensory metaphors—for example, () means "to see" in Ancient Greek.
In the essay "" Derrida indicates that gestures at a number of heterogeneous features that govern the production of textual meaning. Words and signs are not identical with what they signify, and only acquire meaning through their differences from other words and signs; meaning arises from the differentiation of words from one another, and the consequential engendering of binary oppositions and hierarchies. Thus, meaning is forever "deferred" or postponed through an endless chain of signifiers. Derrida refers to this process as espacement or "spacing" and temporisation or "temporising".
Derrida developed the concept of deeper in the course of an argument against the phenomenology of Husserl, who sought a rigorous analysis of the role of memory and perception in our understanding of sequential items such as music or language. Derrida's approach argues that because the perceiver's mental state is constantly in flux and differs from one re-reading to the next, a general theory describing this phenomenon is unachievable.
A term related to the idea of in Derrida's thought is the supplement, "itself bound up in a supplementary play of meaning which defies semantic reduction."
Between structure and genesis Derrida approaches texts as constructed around oppositions which all speech has to articulate if it intends to make any sense whatsoever. This is so because identity is viewed in non-essentialist terms as a construct, and because constructs only produce meaning through the interplay of differences inside a "system of distinct signs". This approach to text, in a broad sense,Royle, Nicholas (2004) Jacques Derrida, pp. 62–63Derrida and Ferraris (1997) p.76 emerges from semiology advanced by Ferdinand de Saussure.
Derrida's position might broadly be stated as being that language is fluid rather than ideally static. His notorious comment that "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" ("there is no outside-the-text", sometimes incorrectly translated as "there is nothing outside the text") has given rise to the allegation that he believes that nothing exists but words. Derrida is concerned to distinguish his procedure from Hegel's, because Hegelianism's notion of binary oppositions whose continual supersession (relève) by new higher-level binary oppositions rests on a system of elemental differences, whereas in language there are no fundamental self-sufficient units of meaning.
Saussure, considered one of the fathers of structuralism, explained that terms get their meaning in reciprocal determination with other terms inside language:
Saussure explicitly suggests that linguistics is a branch of a more general semiology, of a science of signs in general, human codes being only one among others. Nevertheless, in the end, as Derrida points out, he makes of linguistics "the regulatory model", and "for essential, and essentially metaphysical, reasons had to privilege speech, and everything that links the sign to phoné":Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Julia Kristeva" in "Positions" (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 21 Derrida prefers to follow the more "fruitful paths (formalization)" of a general semiotics without falling into what he considers to be "a hierarchizing teleology" privileging linguistics, and to speak of 'mark' rather than of language, not as something restricted to mankind, but as prelinguistic, as the pure possibility of language, working everywhere there is a relation to something else.
Derrida sees these differences as working in all languages, systems of distinct signs, and codes, where terms do not have absolute meanings but instead draw meaning from reciprocal determination with other terms. Derrida will take this structural differentiation into account when articulating the meaning of , a mark he felt the need to create and will become a fundamental tool in his lifelong work: deconstruction:Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Julia Kristeva" in "Positions" (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 21
But structural difference cannot be taken as absolutely basic; it must also be deconstructed, by destabilizing its static, synchronic, taxonomic, hierarchical, ahistoric elements, bearing in mind that all structure already refers to the generative movement in the play of differences.Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Julia Kristeva" in "Positions" (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 28–30
also involves deferring, the recognition that meaning is not only synchronous differentiation from other terms inside a structure of marks or traces, but also diachronous referral back to the origins and development of the mark or trace and its meanings - difference as structure and deferring as genesis:Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Julia Kristeva" in "Positions" (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 28–30
One consequence of this approach is that the subject is not present to itself, but is constituted in the spacing and temporising process of :
Questioning the myth of the presence of meaning in itself ("objective") and/or for itself ("subjective"), Derrida's approach is to deconstruct texts in order to show where conceptual oppositions are put to work in the construction of meaning and values:
These relations with other terms express not only meaning but also values. Such oppositions are put to work in texts in both theoretical and practical ways. The first task of deconstruction is to reveal their operation in philosophical, literary, juridical etc. texts:Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta," in "Positions" (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 42–44
It is not that the final task of deconstruction is to surpass all oppositions, for they are structurally necessary to produce sense; they cannot simply be suspended once and for all. But this does not obviate their need to be analyzed and criticized in all their manifestations, by showing the way logical and axiological oppositions are at work in all discourse in order for it to be able to produce meaning and values.Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta," in "Positions" (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 42
Illustration For example, the word "house" derives its meaning more from the way it differs from "shed", "mansion", "hotel", "building", etc. than from the way it is tied to a certain image of a traditional house. The relationship between signifier and signified depends on each term being established in reciprocal determination with the other terms rather than on an ostensive description or definition.
When can we talk about a "house" or a "mansion" or a "shed"? The same can be said about verbs, in all the world languages: when should we stop saying "walk" and start saying "run"? The same happens, of course, with adjectives: when must we stop saying "yellow" and start saying "orange", or stop defining as "black" and start saying "white", or "rich" and "poor", "entrepreneur" and "worker", "civilized" and "primitive", "man" and "animal", "beast" and "sovereign", "christian" and "pagan", or "beautiful" and start saying "ugly", or "bad" and start saying "good", or "truth" and start saying "false", "determined" and "free"? Or "in" and "out", "here" and "there", "now" and "then", "past" and "present" and "future" and "eternal"? Not only are the topological differences between the words relevant here, but the differentials between what is signified is also covered by différance. Deferral also comes into play, as the words that occur following "house" or "white" in any expression will revise the meaning of that word, sometimes dramatically so. This is true not only with syntagmatic succession in relation with paradigmatic simultaneity, but also, in a broader sense, between diachronic succession in History related with synchronic simultaneity inside a "system of distinct signs".
Thus, complete meaning is always "differential" and postponed in language; there is never a moment when meaning is complete and total. A simple example would consist of looking up a given word in a dictionary, then proceeding to look up the words found in that word's definition, etc., also comparing with older dictionaries from different periods in time, and such a process would never end.