Jacques Derrida · Philosophy
Derrida’s most famous coinage is a word you cannot hear: <em>differance</em>, spelled with an a. It names the double movement by which meaning is produced - signs mean only by <em>differing</em> from other signs, and any final, present meaning is endlessly <em>deferred</em>. There is no first word, no pure presence, only the play of traces.
In 1968 Derrida delivered a lecture whose title was a single invented word: Differance - the ordinary French difference with the second e replaced by an a. The joke, and the point, is that in spoken French the two words sound exactly the same: difference and differance are pronounced identically. You can only tell them apart in writing. The misspelling is therefore a small bomb planted in the tradition that prized speech over writing: here is a crucial difference - the very difference Derrida wants to name - that cannot be heard at all, that exists only on the page. The silent a is, as Derrida put it, a kind of ‘mute mark,’ a difference that escapes the ear and so escapes the metaphysics of presence that treats the living voice as the home of meaning.
What does the word name? Derrida built it on the French verb differer, which carries two meanings English splits into two words. Differer can mean ‘to differ’ - to be unlike, distinct, other. And it can mean ‘to defer’ - to delay, postpone, put off until later. Differance fuses both: it names the way meaning is produced through differences and through endless postponement. Derrida warned that differance is ‘neither a word nor a concept’ in the ordinary sense - it does not name a thing or an idea but rather the silent, productive movement that makes things and ideas, differences and presences, possible in the first place.
The first half of differance - differing - comes from the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, whose lectures revolutionized the study of language. Saussure’s key insight was that signs have no meaning in themselves, in isolation. A word does not mean by some natural resemblance to the thing it names (there is nothing dog-like about the sounds ‘d-o-g’), nor by containing a little nugget of meaning inside it. Rather, a sign means by virtue of its differences from all the other signs in the system. ‘Cat’ means what it does partly because it is not ‘cot,’ not ‘cap,’ not ‘dog,’ not ‘bat.’ Value is differential: each term is defined by its place in a web of contrasts. Saussure summed it up in a famous formula: in language ‘there are only differences without positive terms.’
Derrida seized on this. If meaning is purely a matter of differences, then no sign is self-sufficient; each one depends on, and refers to, all the others it differs from. The meaning of any sign is therefore never simply present in that sign - it is scattered across the whole system of differences, none of which is ever fully there at the moment you use the word. When you say ‘cat,’ the entire network of contrasts that gives the word its value is not present before your mind; it operates silently, in absence. Meaning is constituted by what is not there - by the absent differences that every sign carries within it as its condition. This already cracks the metaphysics of presence: at the heart of every present sign is a constitutive reference to what is absent.
Putting the two halves together: every sign means by differing from absent others, and full meaning is endlessly deferred. From this Derrida draws his most important concept, the trace. Since each sign carries within it the absent differences that give it value, every present sign bears the marks - the traces - of what it is not, of the other signs and of the past and future uses on which it depends. The present is never pure: it is always already woven through with traces of absence. There is no ‘now’ of meaning that is not haunted by a ‘before’ and an ‘after,’ no presence that is not constituted by what is not present. The trace is the mark of this constitutive absence at the core of everything that seems simply, fully there.
Why does this matter beyond linguistics? Because presence was the master concept of the whole tradition - truth as the presence of the thing to the mind, the self as consciousness present to itself, meaning as a content present in the speaker’s intention. Differance pulls the rug from under all of it. If even the simplest act of meaning depends on absence, difference, and deferral, then pure presence is not the bedrock but a kind of effect - something produced by the play of differance, never its origin. Derrida turns the tradition upside down: presence does not come first, with absence as its fall; rather differance ‘comes first’ (though it is not really a ‘first’ at all, being prior to the difference between presence and absence) and presence is one of its effects. This is among the most radical thoughts in modern philosophy - and once you have followed it, you cannot quite trust the word ‘present’ again.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that for Derrida, differance (with an a) names two things at once: that signs mean only through their differences from other signs, and that full presence of meaning is endlessly deferred along a chain of signs. Each sign carries the trace of others it is not. Explain why this means meaning is never fully…
Leads to Saussure.
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