In the 1960s, Jacques Derrida used this concept in two of his early books, namely Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology.
His refusal to apply only one name to his concepts is a deliberate strategy to avoid a set of metaphysical assumptions that, he argues, have been central to the history of European thought.
Trace can be seen as an always contingent term for a "mark of the absence of a presence, an always-already absent present", of the 'originary lack' that seems to be "the condition of thought and experience".
[2] Deconstruction, unlike analysis or interpretation, tries to lay the inner contradictions of a text bare, and, in turn, build a different meaning from that: it is at once a process of destruction and construction.
One of the many difficulties of expressing Jacques Derrida's project (deconstruction) in simple terms is the enormous scale of it.
Just to understand the context of Derrida's theory, one needs to be acquainted intimately with philosophers such as Socrates–Plato–Aristotle, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Charles Sanders Peirce, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emmanuel Levinas, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and others.
Derrida's philosophy is chiefly concerned with metaphysics, although he does not define it rigorously, and takes it to be "the science of presence".
Its matrix—if you will pardon me for demonstrating so little and for being so elliptical in order to bring me more quickly to my principal theme—is the determination of being as presence in all the senses of this word.
It would be possible to show that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated the constant of a presence—eidos, arché, telos, energia, ousia, aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, or conscience, God, man, and so forth.
In his belief, it is the structure of language itself that forces us into metaphysics, best represented through truth-values, closures, speech as valorized by Socrates in Phaedrus.
On the other hand, Derrida finds his Nietzschean hope (his own word is "affirmation") in heterogeneity, contradictions, absence, etc.
To counter the privileged position of the speech (parole) or the phonè, he puts forward a new science of grammé or the unit of writing: grammatology.
[14] Trace, or difference, is also pivotal in jeopardizing strict dichotomies: [I]t has been necessary to analyze, to set to work, within the text of the history of philosophy, as well as within the so-called literary text,..., certain marks, shall we say,... that by analogy (I underline) I have called undecidables, that is, unities of simulacrum, "false" verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition, resisting and disorganizing it, without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of speculative dialectics.
[15] While the 'trace' cannot be indicated as linear or properly 'chronological' in any sense of the word, its resonance as a relay situates it as constitutive of temporality in a way prior to and conditional of historicity, as such: "It is because of différance that the movement of signification is possible only if each so-called 'present' element, each element appearing on the scene of presence, is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element, this trace being related no less to what is called the future than to what is called the past, and constituting what is called the present by means of this very relation to what it is not: what it absolutely is not, not even a past or a future as a modified present.
Derrida himself explains: Lévi-Strauss will always remain faithful to this double-intention: to preserve as an instrument that whose truth-value he criticizes, conserving.....all these old concepts, while exposing....their limits, treating them as tools which can still be of use.
Heidegger said that the possibility of 'being', or what he called "Dasein" (meaning being-there), is the presupposition behind any definition, any defined entity.
Putting "Being" under erasure is an attempt by Heidegger to save his concept of "Being" from becoming the metaphysical origin and the eschatological end of all entities.
Trace, unlike "Dasein", is the absence of the presence, never itself the Master-word; it is the radically "other", it plays within a certain structure of difference.