7. Post-structuralism- Jacques Derrida-"Différance" Flashcards
1
Q
“Différance”
A
- One of his most influential concepts among many – such as the trace, the supplement, hymen, etc. – if that of differance.
- It captures – inaudibly – both of the meanings of the French word différer, which in turn comprises the English meanings of “to differ” (to be different, but spatially synchronic) and “to defer” (being delayed, but identical).
- Replacing the usual “e” by an inaudible “a,” Derrida manages to evoke the ending “ance”, which usually denotes a processual but enabling state.
- “In the one case, ‘to differ’ signifies nonidentity; in the other case, it signifies the order of the same…. We provisionally give the name differance to this sameness which is not identical: by the silent writing of it’s a, it has the desired advantage of referring to differing, both as spacing/temporalizing and as the movement that structures every dissociation…. With it’s a, difference more properly refers to what in classical language would be called the origin or production of differences and the differences between differences, the play [jeu] of differences. Its locus and operation will therefore be seen whenever speech appeals to difference” (279).
- Differance thus enables differences to occur; it is the non-original (since differential itself) “origin” of differences.
- Saussure had written: “a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language, there are only differences without positive terms.”
- The differences we are asked to think are then differences that exist without two positive terms being present. Their very presence is undermined by the spatio-temporal chain of supplementation that makes presence impossible. These differences are, in turn, the “effect” or the “trace” of differance which, consequentially, cannot ever be present, either.
2
Q
Différance and language
A
- Language, by definition, is the re-presentation of something that is not present – otherwise we wouldn’t need language. The “thing itself,” to which language refers both in its written and in its spoken form, is never present, although we can only re-present it with language:
- “Signs represent the present in its absence; they take the place of the present…. The sign would thus be a deferred presence…. The movement of signs defers the moment of encountering the thing itself, the moment at which we could lay hold of it, consume or expend it, touch it, see it, have a present intuition of it” (284).
3
Q
Différance and being
A
- Differance itself cannot “be,” as being – and the entire metaphysical tradition based on it – presumes being as presence (or as absence, as non-presence). It is a non-original origin that produces effects, and can only be thought of, approached, conceptualized, according to the effects and traces it produces.
- “What we note as differance will thus be the movement of play that “produces” (and not by something that is simply an activity) these differences, these effects of differance. This does not mean that the differance which produces differences is before them in a simple and in itself unmodified and indifferent present. Differance is the nonfull, nonsimple ‘origin,’; it is the structured and differing origin of difference.” [These differences] have been produced; they are the effects produced, but effects that do not have as their cause a subject or substance, a thing in general, or a being that is somewhere present and itself escapes the play of difference” (286).
- If that were the case, Derrida would simply supplement another ‘transcendental signifier’ (differance) to the history of previous ones (logos, man, God, etc.), and would thus continue the very history of metaphysics that he analyzes and criticizes.
4
Q
Saussure
A
- What interests Derrida about Saussure is that the latter, his insights in the totally differential structure of language notwithstanding, desperately tries to save something “present.” In Saussure’s case, this is the spoken word which, as he repeatedly insists, escapes what the written language suffers: the very delay and absence that the spoken word somehow seems to avoid.
- If, then, language is always differential, can we then at least assume a subject that is “present to itself” when it speaks, and thus safeguards some kind of presence?
- The problem with Saussure, however, is not only that he still considers written language as something of less value than the spoken word, and assumes some kind of presence for the latter;
- the problem is that the very assumption of a clean separation (or: dichotomy) between signifier and signified assumes that there even could exist something like a “pure” signified uncontaminated by its exposure to the chains of signification.
- “Saussure contradicts the critical acquisitions of which we were just speaking. He accedes to the classical exigency of what I have proposed to call ‘transcendental signified,’ which in and of itself, in its essence, would refer to no signifier, would exceed the chain of signs, and would no longer function as a signifier” (333).
- There is no signified outside the supplementary chain of signifiers – or, as Derrida so famously put is: ”Il n’y a pas d’hors-texte” – ”there is no outside of (the) text.”
5
Q
The delayed self
A
- “But can we not conceive of a presence and self-presence of the subject before speech or its signs, a subject’s self-presence in a silent and intuitive consciousness? Such a question presupposes that prior to signs and outside them, and excluding every trace and differance, something such as consciousness is possible. It supposes, moreover, that, even before the substitution of its signs in space and in the world, consciousness can gather itself up in its own presence” (289).
- Such an presumption, however, cannot be upheld; we are never completely self-conscious, as
1) the self we are conscious of is always non-present to the consciousness that is aware of it (Husserl)
2) the self that we might be conscious about is never present to itself, as it constantly negotiates between Id, Ego, and Superego (Freud), and is thus never identical to itself.
3) We cannot “know” this self, as part of it – the unconscious – is organized like a language itself, and thus perpetually “deferred/differing (Lacan).
6
Q
Differance and Dichotomy
A
- If, consequently, not even the Self is a positive term, then there is no positive term that would not, at the same time, contain something of the very other its positivity tries to exclude.
- Differance on the one hand enables us to think of differences (between positive terms), but at the same time makes any positivity impossible, and thus also subverts thinking in dichotomies.
- “The same is precisely difference … as the inverted and equivocal passage from one difference to another, from one term of the opposition to the other…; one of the terms appears as the differance of the other, the other as ‘differed‘ within the systematic ordering of the same (e.g., the intelligible as differing from the sensible, as sensible differed, the concept as differed-differing intuition, life as differing-differed matter; mind as differed-differing life; culture as differed-differing nature; and all the terms designating what is other than physis – techné, nomos, society, freedom, history, spirit, etc. as physis differed or physis differing: physis in differance” (292).
- Any assumption about a “pure,” stable, self-identical, positive entity can only be upheld by the (violent) exclusion of an other that always already inhabits, contaminates (or – why not: enriches, extends, positively challenges) it (cf. Cixous).
7
Q
The Unconscious Reloaded
A
- In terms that echo strongly those of Lacan, Derrida writes:
- “This radical alterity, removed from every possible mode of presence, is characterized by irreducible after-effects, by delayed effects. In order to describe them, in order to read the traces of the ‘unconscious’ traces (there are no ‘conscious’ traces
- [because consciousness implies presence, T.C.]),
- the language of presence or absence, the metaphysical speech of phenomenology, is in principle inadequate… With the alterity of the ‘unconscious,’ we have to deal not with the horizons of modified presents – past or future – but with a ‘past’ that has never been nor will ever be present, whose ‘future’ will never be produced or reproduced in the form of presence” (293).
8
Q
Being and Language
A
-Nothing that has ever been thought of as being a ‘transcendental signifier’ – not even ‘being’ itself, which has been the transcendental signifier behind all transcendental signifiers, because they have all been thought of as ‘being’, existing in a presence – has ever ‘been.’
-There is, however, not the possibility to simply step ‘outside’ this metaphysical language of presence; we cannot simply ‘invent’ another language that would be free of it (comp. the engineer below), as this would simply constitute another impossible ‘Archimedian’ vantage point.
We can, however, take different stances toward this ‘loss’ of a/the transcendental signified (can one loose what one never had?): One is the melancholy caused by just such a loss; the other is the celebration, the jouissance, of a newly-won freedom in the absence of such a (phal)logocentric signified:
-“We must affirm it – in the sense that Nietzsche brings affirmation into play – with a certain laughter and a certain dance” (297).
9
Q
Logocentrism
A
- The fact that Saussure tries to desperately stick to the assumption that there is a presence makes him part of what Derrida calls the logocentric tradition of Western metaphysics:
- “The reduction of writing – as the reduction of the exteriority of the signifier – was part and parcel of phonologism and logocentrism. We know how Saussure, according to the traditional operation that was also Plato’s, Aristotle’s, Rousseau’s, Hegel’s, Husserl’s, etc., excludes writing from the field of linguistics – from language and speech – as a phenomenon of exterior representation, both useless and dangerous … (‘Language and writing are two distinct sign systems; the unique raison d’ être of the second is to represent the first’)” (336).
10
Q
The problem of the structure
A
- What, then, is “post” about poststructuralism as regards the concept of structure?
- no transcendental signified
- “Differences are the effects of transformations, and from this vantage the theme of differance is incompatible with the static, synchronic, taxonomic, ahistoric motifs in the concept of structure” (337)
- Why?
- they all assume some degree of metaphysical stability that exists outside of systems of signs
