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.’
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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