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On Derridean Différance

Introduction

The French philosopher Jacques Derrida who gained prominence outside France with his

lecture “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences” delivered at Johns

Hopkins University in 1966 problematises the Western philosophical as well as scientific notion

of the centre. He attributes this to “logocentrism,” a term which was first coined by the

philosopher Ludwig Klages in the 1900s. “Logocentrism,” according to Derrida, refers to the role

of the metaphysical notion of the irreducible “logos” in producing speech. This proximity of

speech to “logos,” in turn, results in the privileging of speech over writing.

The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a play based on a

fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility

and a reassuring certitude, which itself is beyond the reach of play. (Writing and

Difference 352)

He extends this “logocentrism” to include all “infinitist metaphysics.” Derrida also

demonstrates this notion at play by showing different names that have assumed the role of a

centre in the writings of Western philosophers:

It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center

have always designated an invariable presence—eidos, archē, telos, energeia, ousia

(essence, existence, substance, subject) alētheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God,

man, and so forth. (Writing and Difference 353)

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It may be shown how this notion of “logocentrism,” however, does not accord with the

theological “Logocentrism,” which is accepting the Logos as central to Christian belief. For, if

Derrida’s centre is “beyond the reach of play,” Christ was not:

For we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses, but

one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sinning. (Hebrews

4.15)

The word “logos” finds its origin in the Proto-Indo-European root word leg- “meaning ‘to

collect, gather,’ with derivatives meaning ‘to speak’ on the notion of ‘to gather words, to pick out

words.’” According to the same notion, the Greek word logos also meant “‘computation,

account,’ also ‘reason.’” In fact, the sense of presence that Derrida attributes to language, albeit

critically, finds a splendid illustration in the meaning acquired by a close Latin word of logos,

namely lignum, which “practically” refers to “‘wood, firewood,’” although it literally means

“‘that which is gathered’” (Online Etymology Dictionary).

Grammatology

On what conditions is a grammatology possible? Its fundamental condi­tion is certainly

the undoing [sollicitation] of logocentrism. (Derrida, Of Grammatology 74)

It seems unquestionable that the “science” of grammatology is constructed by Derrida

upon his reading of logocentrism. In fact, the eleventh edition of A Glossary of Literary Terms,

published decades after deconstruction was popularised by Derrida fails to arrange for an entry to

the term except under a discussion of deconstruction. This is not in accord, for whatever reason,

with the claim that writers from Plato to Saussure or texts from “from the Phaedrus to the Course
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in General Linguistics” (103) are given over to its tendencies. Moreover, it unqualifiedly

assumes the critic’s assumption of the term with the same sweeping generalisation of it:

Derrida’s reiterated claim is that not only all Western philosophies and theories of

language but all Western uses of language, hence all Western culture, are logocentric; that

is, they are centred or grounded on a “logos” (which in Greek signified both “word” and

“rationality”) or, in a phrase he adopts from Heidegger, they rely on “the metaphysics of

presence.” (80)

A possible “natural” reason for this occultation is explained by Michael Harrison of The

Chicago School of Media Theory when he discusses the origin of the word in question,

. . . it first appeared in academic writing around 1929 as the German Logozentrisch in the

work of philosopher and psychologist Ludwig Klages. The Oxford English Dictionary,

which defines “logocentric” as, simply, “centered on reason,” claims the word was first

used in English by theologian V. A. Demant in 1942 and Dictionnaire Le Robert cites its

first use in French in 1942 (BDLT 5). In their use, it was generally employed to describe

thinkers preferring speech to writing as communicative technologies. The reason it is

difficult to talk about its origin, despite this information, is that we cannot possibly

understand “logocentrism” as it stands in relation to philosophy and media theory without

thinking of it as used by French theorist Jacques Derrida.

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Spivak says in her Translator’s Preface to Of Grammatology how the notion of the

“metaphysics of presence” is extended by him,

In Of Grammatology, Derrida suggests that this rejection of writing as an appendage, a

mere technique, and yet a menace built into speech – in effect, a scapegoat – is a symptom

of a much broader tendency. He relates this phonocentrism to logocentrism – the belief that

the first and last things are the Logos, the Word, the Divine Mind, the infinite

understanding of God, an infinitely creative subjectivity, and, closer to our time, the

self-­presence of full self-consciousness. (lxviii)

Deconstruction

Derrida’s aim through deconstruction may be summarised in the order prescribed by him

as awakening the Western civilisation to the ramifications of an “inherent” logocentrism, and,

ultimately, to a language free of metaphysics.

Although, in the Exergue in Of Grammatology, Derrida specifies what he calls

logocentrism as “the metaphysics of phonetic writing,” the determination of the logocentrism

which he intends to critique is narratively obtained through attempting to expose the “bad

abstraction” made, not exclusively but most importantly, by Saussure when he understands

language as “phonologic” and rejects writing as having any role in the science of language. Here,

what is worth noting is the retro-spective critique of logocentrism applied by Derrida who assumes

the metaphysical language of those he reviews to be indicative of the logocentrism of the West, “in

general.”
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This logocentrism, this epoch of the full speech, has always placed in parenthesis,

suspended, and suppressed for essential reasons, all free reflection on the origin and status

of writing, all science of writing which was not technology and the history of a technique,

itself leaning upon a mythology and a metaphor of a natural writing. It is this logocentrism

which, limiting the internal system of language in general by a bad ab­straction, prevents

Saussure and the majority of his successors from de­termining fully and explicitly that

which is called "the integral and concrete object of linguistics." (43)

Derrida says about the process of différance that “one begins by determining it as the

ontico-ontological difference before erasing that determination” (24) and about trace that it “is not

more natural than cultural, not more physical than psychic, biological than spiritual” (47, 48).

Therefore, when he says “The ‘theological’ is a determined moment in the total movement of the

trace,” this does not suggest anything about “theology” but leaves the readers trying to figure out

what a “determined moment” means in “the total movement of the trace,” with the first statement

quoted in this paragraph already suggesting the need for “an erasing (of) determination.” It is as

rhetorical, in the non-colloquial sense as to say, “From the moment that there is meaning there are

nothing but signs” (50). This movement of différance is explained by Derrida thus,

This différance is therefore not more sensible than intelligible and it permits the

articulation of signs among themselves within the same abstract order - a phonic or graphic

text for example - or between two orders of expression. It permits the articulation of

speech and writing - in the colloquial sense - as it founds the metaphysical opposition
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between the sensible and the intelligible, then between signifier and signified, expression

and content, etc.

There is a “hierarchising” that Derrida is subjecting the oppositions to, if we were to go by

the arguments made by the writer himself. He says “Without a retention in the minimal unit of

temporal experience, without a trace retaining the other as other in the same, no difference would

do its work and no meaning would appear,” whereas about experience itself he says, “‘Experience’

has always desig­nated the relationship with a presence, whether that relationship had the form of

consciousness or not” (62, 60). In other words, he is calling forth the idea of différance which

always already calls for the “matter” of both time and presence. It becomes concludable then that

this phenomenon which “founds the metaphysical opposition” is already circumscribed in the

“sensible things” of time and presence which precede it. Thus, he becomes guilty of an “originary”

demarcation between “sensible and intelligible,” and subsequently of whatever charge he brings

against the “logocentric metaphysics.”

To understand Derrida’s debt to Freud in bringing up the “reality” of an “absolute past” as

well as what it entails, Spivak’s notes from her Preface are helpful.

In the last two chapters of the Interpretation, meditating in great detail upon "The

Dream-Work" and "The Psychology of the Dream-Process," Freud is compelled, at the

risk of some self-bafflement, to explode the idea of any unified agency for the psyche. By

the time Freud comes to write the "Note," he has clearly established that the workings of

the psychic ap­paratus are themselves not accessible to the psyche. It is this apparatus that

"receives" the stimuli from the outside world. The psyche is "protected" from these stimuli.
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What we think of as "perception" is always already an inscription. If the stimuli lead to

permanent "memory-traces" -marks which are not a part of conscious memory, and which

will constitute the play of the psyche far removed from the time of the reception of the

stimuli-there is no conscious perception. "The inexplicable phenomenon of consciousness

arises [periodically and irregularly] in the perceptual system instead of the permanent

traces." (GW XIV. 4-5, SE XIX. 228) There are periods, then, when the perceptual system

is not activated and that is pre­cisely when the lasting constitution of the psyche is being

determined. It is only the periods of its actual activation that gives us the sense of time.

(xxxix, xl)

It is worth deconstructing the pattern Derrida abandons himself to when engaged in a

piece of deconstruction, such as when he speaks about how an act of metaphorisation always

precedes an establishment of truth. (Spivak, Translator’s Preface, lxxiv)

This experience of the effacement of the signifier in the voice is not merely one illusion

among many-since it is the condition of the very idea of truth ­but I shall elsewhere show in

what it does delude itself. (Derrida, Of Grammatology, 20)

When he does take this up elsewhere, however, he stops short of making the same

conclusion in what may be called as a Derridean or Nietzschean precaution, the amiable criticism

of which by Spivak is quoted later on.

Ideality and substantiality relate to themselves, in the element of the res cogitans, by a

movement of pure auto-affection. Consciousness is the experience of pure auto-affection.

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It calls itself infalli­ble and if the axioms of natural reason give it this certitude, overcome

the provocation of the Evil Spirit, and prove the existence of God, it is because they

constitute the very element of thought and of self-presence. Self­-presence is not disturbed

by the divine origin of these axioms. The infinite alterity of the divine substance does not

interpose itself as an element of mediation or opacity in the transparence of

self-relationship and the purity of auto-affection. God is the name and the element of that

which makes possible an absolutely pure and absolutely self-present self-knowledge. From

Descartes to Hegel and in spite of all the differences that separate the dif­ferent places and

moments in the structure of that epoch, God's infinite understanding is the other name for

the logos as self-presence. The logos can be infinite and self-present, it can be produced as

auto-affection, only through the voice: an order of the signifier by which the subject takes

from itself into itself, does not borrow outside of itself the signifier that it emits and that

affects it at the same time. Such is at least the experience-or consciousness-of the voice: of

hearing (understanding)-oneself-speak [s'entendre-parler]. That experience lives and

proclaims itself as the ex­clusion of writing, that is to say of the invoking of an "exterior,"

"sensible," "spatial" signifier interrupting self-presence.

The deconstruction of “logos” in this paragraph is undertaken by Derrida, in what is

typical of the “technique” as expressly acknowledged to be followed by him, by surrounding it

with the deconstructible premises of “[logos] produced as auto-affection” and “voice” which are

characteristically placed in italics by the translator. The deconstruction of these premises

themselves follows an “ironical” path with the critic posing the argument to the reader rhetorically
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with a surety that they would themselves draw the conclusion. The evidence for precisely the

opposite of what is conveyed by these lines is what is being referred to here as his rhetorical

strategy: “the subject takes from itself into itself, does not borrow outside of itself the signifier that

it emits and that affects it at the same time.” If one poses to think why it is that the critic does not

immediately hold this narrative up to suggest that this is “the condition of the very idea of truth”

which is the consideration that has led us on here, the reason becomes clear: if he were to suggest

this, he would be as much guilty of calling in categorical “truth” claims that he himself is so

desperately trying to wash his hands off. Instead, this rhetorical strategy would persuade the

unsuspecting reader to make the conclusion that he wants to make without suspecting the writer

himself of falling short of deconstructive grace. The categorical conclusion which can be drawn

from this is the fact that deconstruction is a metaphysics that seeks to ambush the metaphysics of

logocentrism. Thus, the “truth” of deconstruction is shown to be emotionally and affectively

dependent on the “lie” of logocentrism making Derrida “the critic-philosopher” described by Paul

de Man in “Semiology and Rhetoric,” to say as yet nothing of the logocentric incompatibility of

deconstruction. “. . . if truth is the recognition of the systematic character of a certain kind of error,

then it would be fully dependent on the prior existence of this error” (32).

Spivak’s cursory criticism of Derrida offered in the Translator’s Preface is nevertheless

born of a deep trust in the technique of deconstruction which is why it still does not resonate in

content with what has been done here. In an attempt to bring to light a sense of presence that

Derrida had overlooked in a certain comment made by him at an interview, she says that “When

Derrida claims for himself that he is within yet without the clôture of metaphysics, is the
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difference not pre­cisely that he knows it at least?” (Translator’s Preface xxxviii) It must be also

pointed out that the “metaphysics” alluded to by Spivak need not be the “metaphysics” alluded to

here to the extent that it is not the intention to pass judgement on whether deconstructionists up to

now have with or without intention held to the “metaphysics” in their writings being exposed.

Philosophy behind

Harold Bloom writes in The Anxiety of Influence:

Poetic Influence - when it involves two strong, authentic poets, - always proceeds by a

misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a

misinterpretation. The history of fruitful poetic influence, which is to say the main

tradition of Western poetry since the Renaissance, is a history of anxiety and self-saving

caricature, of distortion, of perverse, wilful revisionism without which modern poetry as

such could not exist. (30)

A similar influence can be seen in how Derrida understands subjectivity through

différance. In the interview with Julia Kristeva titled “Semiology and Grammatology,” found in a

collection of his interviews called Positions, he speaks about différance:

It confirms that the subject, and first of all the conscious and speaking subject, depends

upon the system of differences and the movement of différance, that the subject is not

present, nor above all present to itself before différance, that the subject is constituted only

in being divided from itself, in becoming space, in temporising, in deferral. . . . (29)

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In other words, according to Derrida, it is in realising the moment of différance that ‘the

subject is constituted.’ Compare this with the narrative of the Tower of Babel in the Bible:

Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the

heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face

of the whole earth.” (Revised Standard Version, 11.4; my emphasis)

What is underway here is a people of “one language and few words” attempting to “make a

name” for themselves (11.1). Shortly after this, the account describes what God does to them:

“. . . Come, let us go down, and there, confuse their language, that they may not

understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the

face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. (11.7-8)

This is a prefatory moment to Derrida’s definition of subjectivity. Allegorically,

subjectivity is what the “one people” were attempting to build through the construction of the

tower of Babel by making a name for themselves. What God does in Genesis is what Derrida

attempts to do through deconstruction. He confuses the logocentric subjectivity of the West by

suggesting the implausibility of building a subjectivity except through différance (20). For those

who believe in him, this results, analogical to the Biblical narrative, in the inability of establishing

a personal and ethnic identity which the Tower of Babel symbolises.

If, however, in the description of the moment of différance which gives rise to

one’s subjectivity – which includes his own – Derrida fails to make the intertextual connection

with the biblical narrative of the Tower of Babel, it is predictably the case that every thought

which arose out of derridean subjectivity has the very text for a “trace,” a trace which is
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simultaneously also a presence even according to the deconstructive standpoint and inasmuch as

the his project ‘rigorously’ deconstructed logocentrism.

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