Différance — A neologism coined by Jacques Derrida, introduced in the lecture “La différance” (delivered to the Société française de philosophie on 27 January 1968; published in Théorie d’ensemble [collective volume, 1968] and in Marges de la philosophie [1972]). The term is, in French, an alternative spelling of différence (difference) — with the substitution of a for e in the final syllable. This substitution is inaudible in speech: it manifests only in writing — and this fact is, for Derrida, exemplary and non-accidental.
The Play of the Verb Différer
In French, the verb différer has two irreducibly distinct senses: (1) to differ — to be different, to be other, to distinguish oneself in space (the synchronic and Saussurian sense: the sign has identity only through difference in relation to other signs); and (2) to defer — to differ in time, to postpone, to delay (the diachronic and temporal sense). Différance condenses both senses: it designates at once the movement of spatial differentiation (the play of differences that constitutes signs) and the movement of temporal deferral (the fact that meaning is never fully present — it is always yet to come, always deferred, always referring to another sign).
Critique of the Metaphysics of Presence
The concept is inscribed within Derrida’s deconstructive project targeting the metaphysics of presence (métaphysique de la présence): the Western philosophical tradition — from Plato to Husserl, through Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel, and Heidegger — would have systematically privileged presence as the fundamental mode of being and meaning. The logos (reason, language) was supposed to be the locus of the full presence of meaning, and speech (parole), as the direct expression of thought, was privileged over writing (écriture), which was treated as derivative, secondary, a representation of a representation.
In De la grammatologie (1967), Derrida terms this privileging phonocentrism (centred on the voice) and logocentrism (centred on the logos). Phonocentrism supposes that in speech the speaker is fully present to oneself — thought coincides with sound. But différance shows that even in speech meaning is already traversed by difference and deferral: no sign is self-present (self-evident, self-sufficient); it has meaning only in relation to other signs, and those refer to others, and so on indefinitely. There is no arkhé (full origin, first meaning, inaugural presence) — there is only the play of differences.
Writing as Paradigm
For Derrida, writing is not merely a supplement to speech (as the tradition supposes): it is the paradigm of the functioning of all signs, including oral ones. The concept of archi-writing (archi-écriture) designates this general functioning of language as a play of differences and traces (traces): each sign bears the mark of the other signs from which it differs, and the presence of any element is only possible against the background of the absence of all others.
Différance is not a concept in the traditional sense — it has no positive essence, it is not a thing, it cannot be defined except negatively: it is “neither a word nor a concept” (Derrida, “La différance”). It is instead a strategy of reading and writing that exposes the mechanisms by which philosophical texts suppress or marginalise what threatens the presence they seek to guarantee.
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