Différance — A neologism coined by Jacques Derrida, presented in the lecture “La différance” (delivered to the Société française de philosophie on 27 January 1968 and collected in Marges de la philosophie, 1972). It is an altered spelling of the French différence (difference), with the e of the final syllable replaced by an a: the change is inaudible in speech and registers only in writing, a fact Derrida regards as exemplary rather than accidental. The term exploits the double meaning of the French verb différer: at once to differ (to be distinct, to distinguish oneself in space, as with the Saussurian sign, which has identity only through opposition to others) and to defer (to postpone in time). Différance therefore names both the play of differences that constitutes meaning and the perpetual deferral whereby meaning is never fully present, always referring on to another sign. With this Derrida criticises the metaphysics of presence — the tendency of the Western tradition, from Plato to Husserl, to privilege full presence and, with it, speech (parole) over writing (écriture), treated as a merely derivative representation. In De la grammatologie (1967) he calls this hierarchy logocentrism and phonocentrism. Différance shows that there is no origin or first presence, only the play of differences and traces (traces): each sign bears the mark of those from which it differs. Being “neither a word nor a concept,” it is bound up with deconstruction and archi-writing, the strategies by which Derrida exposes how texts suppress whatever threatens the presence they aim to secure.
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