Explaining [Everything but] Différance

Différance: The Metaphysics of Derrida and Its Critique of Metaphysics

Despite how complex the philosophical landscape became throughout the 19th and 20th century, Jacques Derrida managed to (de)construct something new out of the tools around him and make some of the greatest contributions to philosophy of all time. Of course, even the layman of philosophy might be familiar with Derridian terms like ‘deconstruction’ or the infamous "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte," commonly translated to English as “there is nothing outside of the text,” yet both of these ‘ideas’ may be best understood as a response to Heidegger and as fundamentally conjoined with Derrida’s neographism of Différance as laid out in his lecture of the same name given on January 27, 1968, or in Margins of Philosophy(1982). Différance is a metaphysical lack-of-a system that, in a sense, makes meaning ‘possible to happen.’ That is, as a development of the early Heideggerian approach to fundamental ontology, Différance both critiques the idea of any ‘nothingness outside of text’ and also presents itself as an ultimate metaphysical system. Put most simply, Différance is the ‘essential’ structure of meaning for all things that is also itself anti-essentialist, subsuming the theories of meaning of (but certainly not limited to) Heidegger, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Saussure. This essay will investigate what Différance means to Derrida and how exactly it fits into the contemporary philosophical field– specifically as a critique to Heidegger and to structuralism.

Although Heidegger has had a great impact on Derrida’s thought, understanding the role of ‘the turn’ in Heidegger’s philosophy is essential to understanding both his impact on Derrida’s thinking as a whole, as well as understanding Derrida’s critique of Heidegger within Différance. First and foremost, and what is fundamentally different between the two thinkers is that late Heidegger does posit something ‘outside of the text.’ In Heidegger's view, for example, there is something that connects the name “New York” to an actual place in the world. Yet this is where it gets confusing regarding Derrida, as Derrida did not recognize ‘the turn’ that took place in Heidegger’s philosophy. For Derrida, the ‘early Heidegger’ never ‘turned’ into the late-Heidegger, which muddies up the discussion when reading Derrida on Heidegger, as we have to make a distinction between the colloquially late or ‘turned’ Heidegger and the ‘Derridian-Heidegger.’ What differentiates the early from the late Heidegger, then, is their view on fundamental ontology. With the beginning of his investigation of ontology, Heidegger believed that there was a fundamental ontology to things which he sought to explain. This is what he means when he refers to the ‘nothing,’ the ‘4 fold,’ ‘is-ness,’ or ‘being-as-such.’ While later Heidegger eventually realizes that describing this fundamental ontology is impossible (or rather that ‘is-ness’ cannot be described in ‘one final way’), Derrida reads Heidegger as if this realization is not the case. This is because, for Derrida, this turn would imply that something is outside of understanding, or that something is outside of the text.

Finally, in Being and Time,  Heidegger describes phenomenology as the only way which ontology is possible, and further, he writes that “‘Behind' the phenomena of phenomenology there is essentially nothing else[.]” (60, Being and Time, Trans. Macquire, Robinson) If we understand this as coming from the early Heidegger then it seems obvious that Derrida understood this to be literal. Behind the phenomena (phenomena being the only way we can engage with ontology) there cannot be any thing. The one note we must make, however, is that in a sort of dramatic irony, this quote makes sense as both an early and late Heideggerian idea. Heidegger, 20 years after writing this sentence, would likely ‘still agree’ but only insofar as that the ‘nothing’ outside is not meaningless, after all, impossibility (in this instance, trying to ‘capture’ Being in one word (or many)) does not equal meaninglessness. This is what Derrida does not recognize with the turn of Heidegger.

Now that Derrida and his metaphysics have been contextualized by Heidegger, we may begin to contextualize Heidegger’s philosophy with Différance and understand specifically what Derrida is seeking to do. To say that Différance is “difficult to understand” may be true, although it seems that the trouble comes firstly from our investigative method of engagement with it. We must tread carefully and slowly through his evasive writing in order to avoid misconstruing what Derrida means– doing so would more than diminish the impact of Différance and its potential as a ‘metaphysics.’ To begin then, Différance is a ‘neographism’ coined by Derrida– it is not a word (hence, not a neologism as it lacks a logos). He writes that “Différance is literally neither a word nor a concept.”(3) Différance is a ‘pun’ off of the word Différence, yet interestingly the ‘A’ cannot be heard, letting the word challenge the phonocentrism all-too-prevalent in philosophy according to Derrida. But if this is the case, how are we even supposed to discuss it? What Derrida does to ‘describe Différance’ is a careful system of negation, although as he clarifies later, it is unlike a negative-theology as there is nothing the negation is actually describing (unlike negative theology which uses negative terms to positively describe God). However, we may still talk about ‘Différance’ in a positive description, only insofar as we remember what it is not and keep in mind that ‘it’ is not.

Différance has two general characteristics (but we must remember that ‘it’ ‘does not’ ‘have’ these characteristics): “Différance as temporization, Différance as spacing.”(9) The neographism employs meaning from two other French words, Différence and Differer. It ‘differentiates’ in that words mean different things from one another precisely because of their difference. This is the classical Sausserian model of semiotics, meaning through difference, which Derrida is adopting. (A dog is not a cat, a bat is not a frog etc.) This is the spatiality of Différance at work, although, this alone is not Différance. Différance (almost more importantly) is unique in its temporalization to other models of meaning (which Différance is not one, again). Derrida’s conception of ‘presence’ and the ‘being-present’ is important here. ‘Being-present’ is how a thing (specifically a word) is understood as ‘present’ only as its meaning comes from the immediate (and not immediate) past and future, not just (or at all, really) the colloquial ‘present-moment.’ He writes that “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, keeping within the mark of the past element, already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element.” (13) With Différance, meaning is never fully present. A word is open to its possible future meaning, and ‘haunted’ by its past meanings (the trace). Derrida is taking the core of Sausserian semiotics while rejecting its fundamentality of meaning– instead of meaning being fixed to a differential web of words, it is fluid and forever changing. This is why Derrida writes “Différance is the non-full, non-simple, structured and differentiating origin of differences.” (11) Further, “Différance is no more static than it is genetic, no more structural than historical.” Différance could thus be articulated as the inherent ‘lack’ of any semiotic system within words, the empty space (the margins) between text, that text being what all ‘things’ are, that is constantly evading our linguistic grip (how can you describe something that has nothing to describe?).

Another key concept for understanding where Différance is relative to Derrida’s philosophy is play. For Derrida, Différance is also responding directly to Hegel’s method of Synthesis through sublation. On page 20, he writes that to conceive of Différance, “we must conceive of a play in which whoever loses wins, and in which one loses and wins on every turn.” Within classical Hegelian sublation, that which is not sublated is ‘removed’ from the meaning of the synthesis, yet, predictably, Différance does not forget the past and its meaning. Whatever loses, that which is lost in sublation, for example, also wins simultaneously in that the loss is itself a new and fluid meaning within and outside (spatially and temporally) the sublated meaning. In a similar vein, but in regards to Freud and the unconscious, Derrida writes that “[the unconscious] sends out delegates, representatives, proxies; but without any chance that the giver of the proxies might ‘exist,’ might be present, be ‘itself’ somewhere… the ‘unconscious’ is no more a ‘thing’ than it is any other thing, is no more a ‘thing’ than it is a virtual or masked consciousness.” (21) Freud's model of the unconscious is already operating under the metaphysics of Différance; Derrida’s point here, in this section of the chapter, is that all of these thinkers, Freud and Hegel in this instance, are already describing Différance. All that Derrida is doing is specifying the workings of their discursive language for them to make sense within his metaphysical system. In essence, Différance is and always has ‘been in’ philosophy. Derrida was not the ‘first person’ to think of it, just that no one had articulated it (or hadn’t articulated, rather) sufficiently in this way where metaphysics operates fundamentally with meaning.

So, how may we tie this back to Heidegger? What exactly makes Derrida a post-Heideggerian thinker? Derrida confronts this question head on, asking if Différance can ultimately be situated into the “division of the ontico-ontological difference… ‘through’... Heidegger’s uncircumventable meditation?”(22) There is no avoiding Heidegger in the conversation of Différance, as prior to Derrida´s metaphysics, Heidegger was the last metaphysician: his ontotheology was a totally encapsulating metaphysics which accounted for virtually everything of being (‘virtually’ because it left room for Derrida to write Différance). It is interesting also to notice that Derrida actually is borrowing Deconstruction from Heidegger: initially used for critiquing the subject/object Cartesian binary (and the privileging of the mind over the body in philosophy) to question the role of ontology and phenomenology, Derrida adopts the same methodology across many fields throughout his work as a whole, the most prominent being deconstruction of logocentrism and carnophallogocentrism. Différance may be useful in understanding what Derrida is actually attacking when he deconstructs a binary; for example, with phonocentrism (the privileging of speech over writing, as critiqued most famously by Derrida in his reading of Plato’s Pharmakon) Derrida looks at the aporias, the inconsistencies within meaning, inherent within speech’s privileging is the ‘codependent’ nature of the binary. It is also not simply to say that the binary should be reversed, but rather the binary isn’t ‘really’ a total opposite ‘binary’ in that each term, through Différance (spatially and temporally), gives its opposite meaning. All Derrida does, then, is follow the margins within the text which reveal these binary’s faults, letting the system collapse in on itself. Deconstruction works precisely on following the rules of the text itself (hence, the ‘affirmative’ quality Derrida stresses throughout his work). It is not simply a critique nor ‘destruction’ which relies on some ‘truth’ outside of the text (such as a Marxist critique which relies on a theory of labor value to critique some 19th century economist); instead, it ‘follows the path of  construction’ (de-construction) to find meaning. The connection to Différance and deconstruction should be clear: ultimately, Derrida is adopting and adapting a Nietzschean affirmation, an early Heideggerian fundamental ontology, Saussurian semiotics, and Hegelian sublation to form a metaphysical system so unsurpassable that it is open to being surpassed in the future. Although, to be frank, it is uncertain what that metaphysics would look like (if it really is possible at all). 

Derrida is often considered to be one of the hardest philosophers to grasp, and this is understandable given the negative and ‘meta’ voice he utilizes in his writing. This difficulty, however, does not come from an arbitrary decision to purposefully be confusing nor to mask a ‘charlatan-ism’ within his work (despite what his proponents such as Jordan Peterson or Noam Chomsky may tell you). Différance can only be spoken about as a negative– the ground of contemporary metaphysics, post-Nietzsche and post-Heidegger, is inherently confusing, and Derrida, as evident by his observation of the (at the time) contemporary philosophical tradition as having already ‘employed’ Différance in some way (whether it be Freud, Hegel, or Saussure), is the only writer who has a certain ‘clarity’ to his metaphysics. Différance cannot be talked about, as it is not an idea, word, nor concept which can be the object of any study, but it serves a pivotal ‘non-role’ within deconstruction that makes deconstruction possible. We may use Différance and its metaphysics to our advantage as a method for deconstruction and a reference for recontextualizing both the possibility of meaning and meaning itself. Without binaries being inherent to social understanding, could there be a plural equality of differences? Perhaps, thus, a totally plural metaphysical understanding of all things, people, objects, or words, would be the basis for which we could begin to construct an inclusive Democracy. If, ‘through’ Différance, we could deconstruct what it means to be ‘human’ vs an ‘animal,’ perhaps then we could reimagine our relationship with eating meat or imagining animals as mindless robots to be farmed.

References

Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time. In J. Macquarrie, & E. Robinson, (Trans.), New York, NY: Harper & Row.

Derrida, J. (1982) Margin of Philosophy. Allan Bass (Trans.), The University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, J. (1978). Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Barbara Harlow (Trans.), Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press