diffrance

Diffrance is a pun in French, used in the context of deconstruction. The pun arises out of two meanings of the French word diffrer: "to defer" (in the sense of to postpone) and "to differ." In the thought of Jacques Derrida, diffrance refers roughly to the fact that words and signs can never summon forth what they mean (the "absent signified", which Derrida called the trace) but can only be defined or explained in other words. Therefore, words and signs are always different from what they mean, and the actual things they refer to are always postponed by human language. Derrida introduced this neologism in the course of an argument against the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, who sought a rigorous analysis of the role of memory and perception in our understanding of sequential data such as music or language. Derrida's diffrance argued that because the perceiver's mental state was constantly in a state of flux, and differed from one re-reading to the next, a general theory describing this phenomenon was unachievable. Because of this, we are trapped inside an inescapable web of language, which, moreover, shifts each time we hear or read a given human utterance. There is a deferment of meaning with each act of rereading. There is a difference of readings with each rereading. Adrift on a sea of words, we suffer from an epistemological seasickness. Perhaps it is a misconception that diffrance seeks contradictory meanings. It does not necessarily do so. It can, but what it usually describes is the moment of re-experience, the re-arrival of the moment of reading. Roland Barthes once remarked that those who never reread anything are obliged to read the same text everywhere -- this wry comment summarizes the phenomenon of different experience. We are, keep in mind, discussing just one text -- every text. No distinction is necessarily made between texts in this very "basic" level. The difference/deferment is between one text and itself, not between texts, this is the crucial distinction between traditional prespectives and deconstruction.

Diffrance

See also