[1] The term différance then played a key role in Derrida's engagement with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl in Speech and Phenomena.
This misspelling highlights the fact that its written form is not heard, and serves to further subvert the traditional privileging of speech over writing (see arche-writing and logocentrism), as well as the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible.
The difference articulated by the ⟨a⟩ in différance is not apparent to the senses via sound, "but neither can it belong to intelligibility, to the ideality which is not fortuitously associated with the objectivity of theorein or understanding.
Derrida developed the concept of différance deeper in the course of an argument against the phenomenology of Husserl, who sought a rigorous analysis of the role of memory and perception in our understanding of sequential items such as music or language.
Derrida's approach argues that because the perceiver's mental state is constantly in flux and differs from one re-reading to the next, a general theory describing this phenomenon is unachievable.
A term related to the idea of différance in Derrida's thought is the supplement, "itself bound up in a supplementary play of meaning which defies semantic reduction.
"[4] Derrida approaches texts as constructed around oppositions which all speech has to articulate if it intends to make any sense whatsoever.
His notorious comment that "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" ("there is no outside-the-text", sometimes incorrectly translated as "there is nothing outside the text") has given rise to the allegation that he believes that nothing exists but words.
Nevertheless, in the end, as Derrida points out, he makes of linguistics "the regulatory model", and "for essential, and essentially metaphysical, reasons had to privilege speech, and everything that links the sign to phoné":[8] Derrida prefers to follow the more "fruitful paths (formalization)" of a general semiotics without falling into what he considers to be "a hierarchizing teleology" privileging linguistics, and to speak of 'mark' rather than of language, not as something restricted to mankind, but as prelinguistic, as the pure possibility of language, working everywhere there is a relation to something else.
Questioning the myth of the presence of meaning in itself ("objective") and/or for itself ("subjective"), Derrida's approach is to deconstruct texts in order to show where conceptual oppositions are put to work in the construction of meaning and values:[11] At the point at which the concept of différance, and the chain attached to it, intervenes, all the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics (signifier/signified; sensible/intelligible; writing/speech; passivity/activity; etc.
To do justice to this necessity is to recognize that in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy.
But this does not obviate their need to be analyzed and criticized in all their manifestations, by showing the way logical and axiological oppositions are at work in all discourse in order for it to be able to produce meaning and values.
This is also true with all ontological oppositions and its many declensions, not only in philosophy as in human sciences in general, cultural studies, theory of Law, et cetera.
For example: the intelligible and the sensible, the spontaneous and the receptive, autonomy and heteronomy, the empirical and the transcendental, immanent and transcendent, as the interior and exterior, or the founded and the founder, normal and abnormal, phonetic and writing, analysis and synthesis, the literal sense and figurative meaning in language, reason and madness in psychiatry, the masculine and feminine in gender theory, man and animal in ecology, the beast and the sovereign in the political field, theory and practice as distinct dominions of thought itself.
It may seem paradoxical to suggest that différance, a word invented by Derrida, is not a concept (i.e. does not have a definition), but this is indicative of his broad general approach.
Derrida introduces a number of new words and reinterprets others ("deconstruction" itself being the best-known example), but he vigorously resists attempts to pin them down to precise conceptual definitions.
He does not seek simply to replace existing conceptual vocabularies with a new "deconstructive" one, whose terms would themselves silently embody precisely the same kinds of systems and structures of meaning, belief and value that he was questioning.
(It is not irrelevant that for Heidegger the Ancient Greek word for "truth" - aletheia - means "unconcealing", i.e. bringing out of concealment into the light.)
We reside, according to this philosophy, in a web of language, or at least one of interpretation, that has been laid down by tradition and which shifts each time we hear or read an utterance—even if it is the same utterance.
The easiest way to understand this is to imagine Saussure's model as a two-dimensional plane, where each signified is separated from others by the differences in its sound image.
Différance is not only irreducible to any ontological or theological—ontotheological—reappropriation, but as the very opening of the space in which ontotheology—philosophy—produces its system and its history, it includes ontotheology, inscribing it and exceeding it without return.
[17]Yet he does not approach this absence and loss with the nostalgia that marks Heidegger's attempt to uncover some original truths beneath the accretions of a false metaphysics that have accumulated since Socrates.
Derrida's non-concept of différance, resembles, but is not, negative theology, an attempt to present a tacit metaphysics without pointing to any existent essence as the first cause or transcendental signified.
"[18] In contrast to negative theology, which posits something supereminent and yet concealed and ineffable, différance is not quite transcendental, never quite "real", as it is always and already deferred from being made present.
"[19] The differences and deferrings of différance, Derrida points out, are not merely ideal, they are not inscribed in the contours of the brain nor do they fall from the sky, the closest approximation would be to consider them as historical, that is, if the word history itself did not mean what it does, the airbrushing speech of the victor/vanquished.
Derrida has shown an interest in negative or apophatic theology, one of his most important works on the topic being his essay "Sauf le nom".
"[22] Bernard Stiegler argues in his book, Technics and Time, 1, that this represents a hesitation in Derrida: "Now phusis as life was already différance.
In any event, it winds up contradicting the most interesting critical motive of the Course, making of linguistics the regulatory model, the "pattern" for a general semiology of which it was to be, by all rights and theoretically, only a part.
The theme of the arbitrary, thus, is turned away from its most fruitful paths (formalization) toward a hierarchizing teleology: "Thus it can be said that entirely arbitrary signs realize better than any others the ideal of the semiological process; this is why language, the most complex and most widespread of the systems of expression, is also the most characteristic one of them all; in this sense linguistics can become the general pattern for all semiology, even though language is only a particular system" (p. 101).
The contradiction between these two moments of the Course is also marked by Saussure's recognizing elsewhere that "it is not spoken language that is natural to man, but the faculty of constituting a language, that is, a system of distinct signs ... ," that is, the possibility of the code and of articulation, independent of any substance, for example, phonic substance.It is also the becoming-space of the spoken chain—which has been called temporal or linear; a becoming-space which makes possible both writing and every correspondence between speech and writing, every passage from one to the other.