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old.D0LLySh33p
Guest
And people wonder why I try and not study but rather play CS, drink and get stoned when I have to analyse stuff like this:
Différance is a term Derrida coined in 1968 in light of his researches into the Saussurian and structuralist theory of language. While Saussure had gone to great pains to show that language in its most general form could be understood as a system of differences, ‘without positive terms’, Derrida noted that the full implications of such a conception were not appreciated by either latter-day structuralists, or Saussure himself. Difference without positive terms implies that this dimension in language must always remain unperceived, for strictly speaking, it is unconceptualisable. With Derrida, difference becomes the prototype of what remains outside the scope of Western metaphysical thought because it is the latter’s very condition of possibility. Of course, in everyday life people readily speak about difference and differences. We say, for instance, that ‘x’ (having a specific quality) is different from ‘y’ (which has another specific quality), and we usually mean that it is possible to enumerate the qualities which make up this difference. This, however, is to give difference positive terms - implying that it can have a phenomenal form - so it cannot be the difference Saussure announced, one that is effectively unconceptualisable. The first reason for Derrida’s neologism thus becomes apparent: he wants to distinguish the conceptualisable difference of common sense from a difference that is not brought back into the order of the same and, through a concept, given an identity. Difference is not an identity; nor is it the difference between two identities. Difference is difference deferred (in French the same verb (différer) means both ‘to differ’ and ‘to defer’). Différance alerts us to a series of terms given prominence in Derrida’s work whose structure is inexorably double: pharmakon (both poison and antidote); supplement (both surplus and necessary addition); hymen (both inside and outside).
Différance is a term Derrida coined in 1968 in light of his researches into the Saussurian and structuralist theory of language. While Saussure had gone to great pains to show that language in its most general form could be understood as a system of differences, ‘without positive terms’, Derrida noted that the full implications of such a conception were not appreciated by either latter-day structuralists, or Saussure himself. Difference without positive terms implies that this dimension in language must always remain unperceived, for strictly speaking, it is unconceptualisable. With Derrida, difference becomes the prototype of what remains outside the scope of Western metaphysical thought because it is the latter’s very condition of possibility. Of course, in everyday life people readily speak about difference and differences. We say, for instance, that ‘x’ (having a specific quality) is different from ‘y’ (which has another specific quality), and we usually mean that it is possible to enumerate the qualities which make up this difference. This, however, is to give difference positive terms - implying that it can have a phenomenal form - so it cannot be the difference Saussure announced, one that is effectively unconceptualisable. The first reason for Derrida’s neologism thus becomes apparent: he wants to distinguish the conceptualisable difference of common sense from a difference that is not brought back into the order of the same and, through a concept, given an identity. Difference is not an identity; nor is it the difference between two identities. Difference is difference deferred (in French the same verb (différer) means both ‘to differ’ and ‘to defer’). Différance alerts us to a series of terms given prominence in Derrida’s work whose structure is inexorably double: pharmakon (both poison and antidote); supplement (both surplus and necessary addition); hymen (both inside and outside).
