Derrida and the notion of DifferencE

Derrida and the Concept of Difference



Derrida and the Concept of Diff'erance

Introduction

Différance

Différance can be understood as signifying both inequality and distinction, as well as persona and non-identity. At the identical time, it is neither word neither concept, considered neither likeness, active neither passive. Différance favours to play in the middle. According to Derrida, it shows the middle voice, “It precedes and groups up the disagreement between passivity and activity” (Derrida, 1973, p.130). Différance always suggests a playful movement. (It is never stagnant). It is through play that it makes (that which it makes). Through its play, différance produces what we realise as differences between phenomena. “It is the nonfull, nonsimple 'origin;' it is the structured and differing source of dissimilarities” (Derrida, 1973, p.131). It is because of différance that significance is possible. Through the very movement (of différance), a occurrence that is experienced as present, or that which appears on the stage of occurrence, displays itself as a relation to both the past and to the future. According to Merleau-Ponty (1962), “There is an intention which always outruns the presentness of the present” (p.44.)

This aim habitually retains the assess of a past element. According to Derrida (1973), both the past and the future conceive a present that is depression, a present in relation to what is not (p.105). Différance habitually locations that which is nameless. In a location where a title finds no dwelling, the nameless signifies an indeconstructable space where every find or mark is imprinted. This trace manifests itself in what is absent. In its manifestation, i.e., the kind in which it presents itself, it, in and of itself, continues undisclosed. “In giving itself it becomes effaced; in being sounded it passes away away” (Derrida, 1973, p.154).

It is by reason of this effacement that the trace implies movement, a movement which necessarily exceeds presence, a movement that exceeds presence and takes the place of being somewhere. It would be very simple to confuse différance, and its nameless location, for what is routinely appreciated to be God. God, different différance, signifies a metaphysical ground, or an “upon which” the eternal is placed. Yet, différance is neither eternal (nor sequential). There is no “upon which” any thing can be placed. For the location is habitually moving (moreover, the location is its shifting and vice versa). Since its indeconstructability is not due to metaphysics of presence, it must emerge in the very spacing of what can be deconstructed. In this positioning, theologians and philosophers, at best, find themselves seeking for answers to inquiries that have not been appropriately articulated.

Surviving Without the reality: A Deconstructive Faith

Whenever one talks of the truth, one implicitly indicates an end of kinds, an end brought forward in the process of unveiling. This end signifies closure, a termination brought forth by a movement-toward- the-end, i.e., truth as a functional self-relation in the nonattendance of necessity. The structure of termination, truth, or closure is apocalyptic, the “truth” of “truth”: Whoever ...