Jacques Derrida - Différance (1968)

http://projectlamar.com/media/Derrida-Differance.pdf

JACQUES DERRIDA

“DIFFERANCE”

The verb “to differ” [diffe’rer] seems to differ from itself. On the one hand, it in-
dicates difference as distinction, inequality, or discernibility; on the other, it ex-
presses the interposition of delay, the interval of a spacing and temporalizing
that puts off until “later” what is presently denied, the possible that is presently
impossible. Sometimes the different and sometimes the deferred correspond [in
French] to the verb “to differ.” This correlation, however, is not simply one be-
tween act and object, cause and effect, or primordial and derived.

In the one case “to differ” signifies nonidentity; in the other case it signifies

the order of the same. Yet there must be a common, although entirely differant1
[différante], root within the sphere that relates the two movements of differing
to one another. We provisionally give the name differance to this sameness
which is not identical: by the silent writing of its a, it has the desired advantage
of referring to differing, both as spacing/temporalizing and as the movement
that structures every dissociation.
This essay appeared originally in the Bulletin de la Socie’te’ frangaise de philosophic, LXII, No. 3 (July-Septemv
ber, 1968), 73-101. Derrida’s remarks were delivered as a lecture at a meeting of the Société at the Sorv
home, in the Amphitheatre Michelet, on January 27, 1968, with Jean Wahl presiding. Professor Wahl’s
introductory and closing remarks have not been translated. The essay was reprinted in Théorie d’ensemble,
a collection of essays by Derrida and others, published by Editions Seuil in 1968.

It is reproduced here by permission of Northwestern University Press.

278
255

“Differance” 279

As distinct from difference, differance thus points out the irreducibility
of temporalizing (which is also temporalization-in transcendental language
which is no longer adequate here, this would be called the constitution of pri-
mordial temporality-just as the term “spacing” also includes the constitution
of primordial spatiality). Differance is not simply active (any more than it is a
subjective accomplishment); it rather indicates the middle voice, it precedes and
sets up the opposition between passivity and activity. With its a, differance
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 wherever speech
appeals to difference.

Differance is neither a word nor a concept. In it, however, we shall see the
juncture-rather than the summation-of what has been most decisively in-
scribed in the thought of what is conveniently called our “epoch”: the differ-
ence of forces in Nietzsche, Saussure’s principle of semiological difference,
differing as the possibility of [neurons] facilitation,2 impression and delayed ef-
fect in Freud, difference as the irreducibility of the trace of the other in Levinas,
and the antic-ontological difference in Heidegger.

Reflection on this last determination of difference will lead us to consider
differance as the strategic note or connection-relatively or provisionally privi-
leged-which indicates the closure of presence, together with the closure of the
conceptual order and denomination, a closure that is effected in the functioning
of traces.

I shall speak, then, of a letter-the first one, if we are to believe the alpha-
bet and most of the speculations that have concerned themselves with it.

I shall speak then of the letter a, this first letter which it seemed necessary to
introduce now and then in writing the word “difference.” This seemed neces-
sary in the course of writing about writing, and of writing within a writing
whose different strokes all pass, in certain respects, through a gross spelling
mistake, through a violation of the rules governing writing, violating the law
that governs writing and regulates its conventions of propriety. In fact or theory
we can always erase or lessen this spelling mistake, and, in each case, while
these are analytically different from one another but for practical purposes the
same, find it grave, unseemly, or, indeed, supposing the greatest ingenuousness,
amusing. Whether or not we care to quietly overlook this infraction, the atten-
tion we give it beforehand will allow us to recognize, as though prescribed by
some mute irony, the inaudible but displaced character of this literal permuta-
tion. We can always act as though this makes no difference. I must say from the
start that my account serves less to justify this silent spelling mistake, or still less
to excuse it, than to aggrevate its obtrusive character.

On the other hand, I must be excused if I refer, at least implicitly, to one or
another of the texts that I have ventured to publish. Precisely what I would like
to attempt to some extent (although this is in principle and in its highest degree

256

280 Jacques Derrida

impossible, due to essential de jure reasons) is to bring together an assemblage
of the different ways I have been able to utilize-or, rather, have allowed to be
imposed on me-what I will provisionally call the word or concept of differance
in its new spelling. It is literally neither a word nor a concept, as we shall see. I
insist on the word “assemblage” here for two reasons: on the one hand, it is not
a matter of describing a history, of recounting the steps, text by text, context by
context, each time showing which scheme has been able to impose this graphic
disorder, although this could have been done as well; rather, we are concerned
with the general system of all these schemata. On the other hand, the word “as-
semblage” seems more apt for suggesting that the kind of bringing-together
proposed here has the structure of an interlacing, a weaving, or a web, which
would allow the different threads and different lines of sense or force to sepa-
rate again, as well as being ready to bind others together.

In a quite preliminary way, we now recall that this particular graphic inter-
vention was conceived in the writing-up of a question about writing; it was not
made simply to shock the reader or grammarian. Now, in point of fact, it hap-
pens that this graphic difference (the a instead of the e), this marked difference
between two apparently vocalic notations, between vowels, remains purely
graphic: it is written or read, but it is not heard. It cannot be heard, and we shall
see in what respects it is also beyond the order- of understanding. It is put for-
ward by a silent mark, by a tacit monument, or, one might even say, by a pyra-
mid-keeping in mind not only the capital form of the printed letter but also
that passage from Hegel’s Encyclopaedia where he compares the body of the
sign to an Egyptian pyramid. The a of differance, therefore, is not heard; it re-
mains silent, secret, and discreet, like a tomb.3

It is a tomb that (provided one knows how to decipher its legend) is not far
from signaling the death of the king.

It is a tomb that cannot even be made to resonate. For I cannot even let you
know, by my talk, now being spoken before the Société Francaise de Philoso-
phie, which difference I am talking about at the very moment I speak of it. I can
only talk about this graphic difference by keeping to a very indirect speech
about writing, and on the condition that I specify each time that I am referring
to difference with an e or differance with an a. All of which is not going to sim-
plify matters today, and will give us all a great deal of trouble when we want to
understand one another. In any event, when I do specify which difference I
mean-when I say “with an e” or “with an a”-.-this will refer irreducibly to a
written text, a text governing my talk, a text that I keep in front of me, that I
will read, and toward which I shall have to try to lead your hands and eyes. We
cannot refrain here from going by way of a written text, from ordering our-
selves by the disorder that is produced therein-and this is what matters to me
first of all.

Doubtless this pyramidal silence of the graphic difference between the e and
the a can function only within the system of phonetic writing and within a lan-

257

“Differance” 281
guage or grammar historically tied to phonetic writing and to the Whole culture
which is inseparable from it. But I will say that it is just this-this silence that
functions only within what is called phonetic writing-that points out or re-
minds us in a very opportune way that, contrary to an enormous prejudice,
there is no phonetic writing. There is only purely and strictly phonetic writing.
What is called. phonetic writing can only function-in principle and de jure, and
not due to some factual and technical inadequacy-by incorporating nonpho-
netic “signs” (punctuation, spacing, etc.); but when we examine their structure
and necessity, we will quickly see that they are ill described by the concept of
signs. Saussure had only to remind us that the play of difference was the func-
tional condition, the condition of possibility, for every sign; and it is itself silent.
The difference between two phonemes, which enables them to exist and to op-
erate, is inaudible. The inaudible opens the two present phonemes to hearing,
as they present themselves. If, then, there is no purely phonetic writing, it is
because there is no purely phonetic phone. The difference that brings out
phonemes and lets them be heard and understood [entendre] itself remains
inaudible.

It will perhaps be objected that, for the same reasons, the graphic difference
itself sinks into darkness, that it never constitutes the fullness of a sensible term,
but draws out an invisible connection, the mark of an inapparent relation be-
tween two spectacles. That is no doubt true. Indeed, since from this point of
view the difference between the e and the a marked in “differance” eludes vi-
sion and hearing, this happily suggests that we must here let ourselves be re-
ferred to an order that no longer refers to sensibility. But we are not referred to
intelligibility either, to an ideality not fortuitously associated with the objectiv-
ity of theorem or understanding. We must be referred to an order, then, that re-
sists philosophy’s founding opposition between the sensible and the intelligible.
The order that resists this opposition, that resists it because it sustains it, is des-
ignated in a movement of differance (with an a) between two differences or be-
tween two letters. This differance belongs neither to the voice nor to writing in
the ordinary sense, and it takes place, like the strange space that will assemble
us here for the course of an hour, between speech and writing and beyond the
tranquil familiarity that binds us to one and to the other, reassuring us some-
times in the illusion that they are two separate things.

Now, how am I to speak of the a of differance? It is clear that it cannot be
exposed. We can expose only what, at a certain moment, can become present,
manifest; what can be shown, presented as a present, a being-present in its
truth, the truth of a present or the presence of a present. However, if differance
[E] (I also cross out the “is”) what makes the presentation of being-present pos-
sible, it never presents itself as such. It is never given in the present or to anyone.
Holding back and not exposing itself, it goes beyond the order of truth on this
specific point and in this determined way, yet is not itself concealed, as if it were

258

282 Jacques Derrida

something, a mysterious being, in the occult zone of the nonknowing. Any ex-
position would expose it to disappearing as a disappearance. It would risk ap-
pearing, thus disappearing.

Thus, the detours, phrases, and syntax that I shall often have to resort to
will resemble-will sometimes be practically indiscernible from-those of nega-
tive theology. Already we had to note that differance is not, does not exist, and
is not any sort of being-present (on). And we will have to point out everything
that it is not, and, consequently, that it has neither existence nor essence. It be-
longs to no category of being, present or absent. And yet what is thus denoted
as differance is not theological, not even in the most negative order of negative
theology. The latter, as we know, is always occupied with letting a supraessen-
tial reality go beyond the finite categories of essence and existence, that is, of
presence, and always hastens to remind us that, if we deny the predicate of exis-
tence to God, it is in order to recognize him as a superior, inconceivable, and in-
effable mode of being. Here there is no question of such a move, as will be
confirmed as we go along. Not only is differance irreducible to every ontologi-
cal or theological-onto-theological-reappropriation, but it opens up the very
space in which onto-theology-philosophy-produces its system and its history.
It thus encompasses and irrevocably surpasses onto-theology or philosophy.

For the same reason, I do not know where to begin to mark out this assem-
blage, this graph, of differance. Precisely what is in question here is the require-
ment that there be a de jure commencement, an absolute point of departure, a
responsibility arising from a principle. The problem of writing opens by ques-
tioning the arcbé. Thus what I put forth here will not be developed simply as a
philosophical discourse that Operates on the basis of a principle, of postulates,
axioms, and definitions and that moves according to the discursive line of a ra-
tional order. In marking out differance, everything is a matter of strategy and
risk. It is a question of strategy because no transcendent truth present outside
the sphere of writing can theologically command the totality of this field. It is
hazardous because this strategy is not simply one in the sense that we say that
strategy orients the tactics according to a final aim, a telos or the theme of a
domination, a mastery or an ultimate reappropriation of movement and field.
In the end, it is a strategy without finality. We might call it blind tactics or em-
pirical errance, if the value of empiricism did not itself derive all its meaning
from its opposition to philosophical responsibility. If there is a certain errance
in the tracing-out of differance, it no longer follows the line of logico-philo-
sophical speech or that of its integral and symmetrical opposite, logico-empiri-
cal speech. The concept of play [jeu] remains beyond this opposition; on the eve
and aftermath of philosophy, it designates the unity of chance and necessity in
an endless calculus.

By decision and, as it were, by the rules of the game, then, turning this
thought around, let us introduce ourselves to the thought of differance by way
of the theme of strategy or strategem. By this merely strategic justification, I
want to emphasize that the efficacy of this thematics of differance very well

259

“Differance” 283
may, and even one day must, be sublated, i.e., lend itself, if not to its own re-
placement, at least to its involvement in a series of events which in fact it never
commanded. This also means that it is not a theological thematics.

I will say, first of all, that differance, which is neither a word nor a concept,
seemed to me to be strategically the theme most prOper to think out, if‘not mas-
ter (thought being here, perhaps, held in a certain necessary relation with the
structional limits of mastery), in what is most characteristic of our “epoch.” I
start off, then, strategically, from the place and time in which “we” are, even
though my opening is not justifiable in the final account, and though it is al-
ways on the basis of differance and its “history” that we can claim to know
who and where “we” are and what the limits of an “epoch” can be.

Although “differance” is neither a word nor a concept, let us nonetheless
attempt a simple and approximative semantic analysis which will bring us in
view of what is at stake [en vue de l’enjeu].

We do know that the verb “to differ” [différer] (the Latin verb differre) has
two seemingly quite distinct meanings; in the Littré dictionary, for example,
they are the subject of two separate articles. In this sense, the Latin differre is
not the simple translation of the Greek diapherein; this fact will not be without
consequence for us in tying our discussion to a particular language, one that
passes for being less philosophical, less primordially phiIOSOphical, than the
other. For the distribution of sense in the Greek diaploerein does not carry one
of the two themes of the Latin differre, namely, the action of postponing until
later, of taking into account, the taking-account of time and forces in an opera-
tion that implies an economic reckoning, a detour, a respite, a delay, a reserve, a
representation-all the concepts that I will sum up here in a word I have never
used but which could be added to this series: temporalz'zing. “To differ” in this
sense is to temporalize, to resort, consciously or unconsciously, to the temporal
and temporalizing mediation of a detour that suspends the accomplishment or
fulfillment of “desire” or “will,” or carries desire or will out in a way that an-
nuls or tempers their effect. We shall see, later, in What respects this temporaliz-
ing is also a temporalization and spacing, is Space’s becoming-temporal and
time’s becoming-spatial, is “primordial constitution” of space and time, as
metaphysics or transcendental phenomenology would call it in the language
that is here criticized and displaced.

The other sense of “to differ” [différer] is the most common and most iden-
tifiable, the sense of not being identical, of being other, of being discernible, etc.
And in “differents,” whether referring to the alterity of dissimilarity or the al-
terity of allergy or of polemics, it is necessary that interval, distance, spacing oc-
cur among the different elements and occur actively, dynamically, and with a
certain perseverence in repetition.

But the word “difference” (with an 6) could never refer to differing as tem-
poralizing or to difference as polemos. It is this loss of sense that the word dif-
ferance (with an a) will have to schematically compensate for. Differance can
refer to the whole complex of its meanings at once, for it is immediately and ir-

260

284. Jacques Derrida
reducibly multivalent, something which will be important for the discourse I am
trying to develop. It refers to this whole complex of meanings not only when it
is supported by a language or interpretive context (like any signification), but it
already does so somehow of itself. Or at least it does so more easily by itself
than does any other word: here the a comes more immediately from the present
particle [différant] and brings us closer to the action of “differing” that is in
progress, even before it has produced the effect that is constituted as different or
resulted in difference (with an 3). Within a conceptual system and in terms of
classical requirements, differance could be said to designate the productive and
primordial constituting causality, the process of scission and division whose dif-
ferings and differences would be the constituted products or effects. But while
bringing us closer to the infinitive and active core of differing, “differance” with
an a neutralizes what the infinitive denotes as simply active, in the same way
that “parlance” does not signify the simple fact of speaking, of speaking to or
being spoken to. Nor is resonance the act of resonating. Here in the usage of
our language we must consider that the ending -ance is undecided between ac-
tive and passive. And we shall see why what is designated by “differance” is nei-
ther simply active nor simply passive, that it announces or rather recalls
something like the middle voice, that it speaks of an operation which is not an
operation, which cannot be thought of either as a passion or as an action of a
subject upon an object, as starting from an agent or from a patient, or on the
basis of, or in view of, any of these terms. But philosophy has perhaps com-
menced by distributing the middle voice, expressing a certain intransitiveness,
into the active and the passive voice, and has itself been constituted in this
repression.

How are differance as temporalizing and differance as spacing conjoined?

Let us begin with the problem of signs and writing-since we are already in
the midst of it. We ordinarily say that a sign is put in place of the thing itself, the
present thing-“thing” holding here for the sense as well as the referent. Signs
represent the present in its absence; they take the place of the present. When we
cannot take hold of or show the thing, let us say the present, the being-present,
when the present does not present itself, then we signify, we go through the de-
tour of signs. We take up or give signs; we make signs. The sign would thus be a
deferred presence. Whether it is a question of verbal or written signs, monetary
signs, electoral delegates, or political representatives, the movement of signs de-
fers 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. What I am describing here is the structure of signs as classically determined,
in order to define-a commonplace characterization of its traits-signification
as the differance of temporalizing. Now this classical determination presup-
poses that the sign (which defers presence) is conceivable only on the basis of
the presence that it defers and in view of the deferred presence one intends to
reappropriate. Following this classical semiology, the substitution of the sign

261

“Differance” 285
for the thing itself is both secondary and provisional: it is second in order after
an original and lost presence, a presence from which the sign would be derived.
It is provisional with respect to this final and missing presence, in view of which
the sign would serve as a movement of mediation.

In attempting to examine these secondary and provisional aspects of the
substitute, we shall no doubt catch sight of something like a primordial differ-
ance. Yet we could no longer even call it primordial or final, inasmuch as the
characteristics of origin, beginning, telos, eschaton, etc., have always denoted
presence-ousia, parousia, etc. To question the secondary and provisional char-
acter of the sign, to oppose it to a “primordial” differance, would thus have the
following consequences:

1. Differance can no longer be understood according to the concept of
“sign,” which has always been taken to mean the representation of a presence
and has been constituted in a system (of thought or language) determined on
the basis of and in view of presence.

2. In this way we question the authority of presence or its simple symmetri-
cal contrary, absence or lack. We thus interrogate the limit that has always con-
strained us, that always constrains us-we who inhabit a language and a system
of thought-to form the sense of being in general as presence or absence, in the
categories of being or beingness (ousia). It already appears that the kind of
questioning we are thus led back to is, let us say, the Heideggerian kind, and
that differance seems to lead us back to the ontic-ontological difference. But
permit me to postpone this reference. I shall only note that between differance
as temporalizing-temporalization (which we can no longer conceive within the
horizon of the present) and what Heidegger says about temporalization in Sein
and Zeit (namely, that as the transcendental horizon of the question of being it
must be freed from the traditional and metaphysical domination by the present
or the now)-between these two there is a close, if not exhaustive and irre-
ducibly necessary, interconnection.

But first of all, let us remain with the semiological aspects of the problem to
see how differance as temporalizing is conjoined with differance as spacing.
Most of the semiological or linguistic research currently dominating the field of
thought (whether due to the results of its own investigations or due to its role as
a generally recognized regulative model) traces its genealogy, rightly or wrongly,
to Saussure as its common founder. It was Saussure who first of all set forth the
arbitrariness of signs and the differential character of signs as principles of gen-
eral semiology and particularly of linguistics. And, as we know, these two

themes-the arbitrary and the differential-are in his view inseparable. Arbi-
trariness can occur only because the system of signs is constituted by the differ-
ences between the terms, and not by their fullness. The elements of signification
function not by virtue of the compact force of their cores but by the network of
oppositions that distinguish them and relate them to one another. “Arbitrary
and differential” says Saussure “are two correlative qualities.”
262

286 Jacques Derrida

As the condition for signification, this principle of difference affects the
whole sign, that is, both the signified and the signifying aspects. The signified as-
pect is the concept, the ideal sense. The signifying aspect is what Saussure calls
the material or physical (e.g., acoustical) “image.” We do not here have to enter
into all the problems these definitions pose. Let us only cite Saussure where it in-
terests us:

The conceptual side of value is made up solely of relations and differences with

respect to the other terms of language, and the same can be said of its material

side. . . . Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this: in
language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference gener-

ally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in lan-

guage there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the

signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed be-
fore the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have
issued from the system. The idea of phonic substance that a sign contains is of

less importance than the other signs that surround it.4

The first consequence to be drawn from this is that the signified concept is
never present in itself, in an adequate presence that would refer only to itself.
Every concept is necessarily and essentially inscribed in a chain or a system,
within which it refers to another and to other concepts, by the systematic play
of differences. Such a play, then-differance-is no longer simply a concept, but
the possibility of conceptuality, of the conceptual system and process in general.
For the same reason, differance, which is not a concept, is not a mere word; that
is, it is not what we represent to ourselves as the calm and present self-referen-
tial unity of a concept and sound [phonie]. We shall later discuss the conse-
quences of this for the notion of a word.

The difference that Saussure speaks about, therefore, is neither itself a con-
cept nor one word among others. We can say this a fartiOrz' for differance. Thus
we are brought to make the relation between the one and the other explicit.

Within a language, within the system of language, there are only differ-
ences. A taxonomic Operation can accordingly undertake its systematic, statisti-
cal, and classificatory inventory. But, on the one hand, these differences play a
role in language, in speech as well, and in the exchange between language and
speech. On the other hand, these differences are themselves effects. They have
not fallen from the sky ready made; they are no more inscribed in a topos
noétos than they are prescribed in the wax of the brain. If the word “history”
did not carry with it the theme of a final repression of differance, we could say
that differences alone could be “historical” through and through and from the
start.

What we note as differance will thus be the movement of play that “pro-
duces” (and not by something that is simply an activity) these differences, these

263

“Differance” 287
effects of difference. This does not mean that the differance which produces dif-
ferences 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 differences.

Since language (which Saussure says is a classification) has not fallen from
the sky, it is clear that the 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. If such a presence were implied (quite classically) in the general
concept of cause, we would therefore have to talk about an effect without a
cause, something that would very quickly lead to no longer talking about ef-
fects. I have tried to indicate a way out of the closure imposed by this system,
namely, by means of the “trace.” No more an effect than a cause, the “trace”
cannot of itself, taken outside its context, suffice to bring about the required
transgression.

As there is no presence before the semiological difference or outside it, we
can extend what Saussure writes about language in signs in general: “Language
is necessary in order for speech to be intelligible and to produce all of its effects;
but the latter is necessary in order for language to be established; historically,
the fact of speech always comes first.”5

Retaining at least the schema, if not the content, of the demand formulated
by Saussure, we shall designate by the term diffemnce the movement by which
language, or any code, any system of reference in general, becomes “histori-
cally” constituted as a fabric of differences. Here, the terms “constituted,”
“produced,” “created,” “movement,” “historically,” etc., with all they imply,
are not to be understood only in terms of the language of metaphysics, from
which they are taken. It would have to be shown why the concepts of produc-
tion, like those of constitution and history, remain accessories in this respect to
what is here being questioned; this, however, would draw us too far away to-
day, toward the theory of the representation of the “circle” in which we seem to
be enclosed. I only use these terms here, like many other concepts,’out of strate-
gic convenience and in order to prepare the deconstruction of the system they
form at the point which is now most decisive. In any event, we will have under
stood, by virtue of the very circle we appear to be caught up in, that differance,
as it is written here, is no more static than genetic, no more structural than his-
torical. Nor is it any less so. And it is completely to miss the point of this
orthographical impropriety to want to object to it on the basis of the oldest of
metaphysical oppositions-for example, by Opposing some generative point of
view to a structuralist-taxonomic point of view, or conversely. These opposi-
tions do not pertain in the least to differance; and this, no doubt, is what makes
thinking about it difficult and uncomfortable.

If we now consider the chain to which “differance” gets subjected, accord-
ing to the context, to a certain number of nonsynonymic substitutions, one will

264

288 Jacques Derrida
ask Why we resorted to such concepts as “reserve,” “protowriting,” “proto-
trace,” “spacing,” indeed to “supplement” or “pharmaleon,” and, before long,
to “hymen,” etc.6

Let us begin again. Differance is what makes the movement of signification
possible only if each element that is said to be “present,” appearing on the stage
of presence, is related to something other than itself but retains the mark of a
past element and already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation
to a future element. This trace relates no less to what is called the future than to
what is called the past, and it constitutes What is called the present by this very
relation to what it is not, to What it absolutely is not; that is, not even to a past
or future considered as a modified present. In order for it to be, an interval must
separate it from what it is not; but the interval that constitutes it in the present
must also, and by the same token, divide the present in itself, thus dividing,
along with the present, everything that can be conceived on its basis, that is,
every being-in particular, for our metaphysical language, the substance or sub-
ject. Constituting itself, dynamically dividing itself, this interval is what could
be called spacing; time’s becoming-spatial or space’s becoming-temporal (tem-
poralizing). And it is this constitution of the present as a “primordial” and irre-
ducibly nonsimple, and, therefore, in the strict sense nonprimordial, synthesis
of traces, retentions, and protentions (to reproduce here, analogically and pro-
visionally, a phenomenological and transcendental language that will presently
be revealed as inadequate) that I propose to call protowriting, prototrace, or
differance. The letter (is) (both) spacing (and) temporalizing.7

Given this (active) movement of the (production of) differance without ori-
gin, could we not, quite simply and without any neographism, call it differenti-
ation? Among other confusions, such a word would suggest some organic unity,
some primordial and homogeneous unity, that would eventually come to be di-
vided up and take on difference as an event. Above all, formed on the verb “to
differentiate,” this word would annul the economic signification of detour, tem-
poralizing delay, “deferring.” I owe a remark in passing to a recent reading of
one of Koyré’s texts entitled “Hegel at Jena.”3 In that text, Koyré cites long pas-
sages from the Jena Logic in German and gives his own translation. On two oc-
casions in Hegel’s text he encounters the expression “differente Beziehung.”
This word (different), Whose root is Latin, is extremely rare in German and
also, I believe, in Hegel, who instead uses versckieden or ungleich, calling differ-
ence Unterschied and qualitative variety Verschiedenheit. In the Jena Logic, he
uses the word different precisely at the point where he deals with time and the
present. Before coming to Koyré’s valuable remark, here are some passages
from Hegel, as rendered by Koyré:

The infinite, in this simplicity is-as a moment opposed to the self-identical-

the negative. In its moments, while the infinite presents the totality to (itself)

and in itself, (it is) excluding in general, the point or limit; but in this, its own

265

“Differance” 289

(action of) negating, it relates itself immediately to the other and negates itself.

The limit or moment of the present (der Gegen-wart), the absolute “this” of

time or the now, is an absolutely negative simplicity, absolutely excluding all

multiplicity from itself, and by this very fact is absolutely determined; it is not

an extended whole or quantum within itself (and) which would in itself also

have an undetermined aspect or qualitative variety, which of itself would be re-

lated, indifferently (gleichgiéltig) or externally to another, but on the contrary,

this is an absolutely different relation of the simple.9

And Koyré specifies in a striking note: “Different relation: differente
Beziehung. We could say: differentiating relation.” And on the following page,
from another text of Hegel, we can read: “Diese Beziehung ist Gegenwart, als
eine differente Beziehung” (This relation is [the] present, as a different relation).
There is another note by Koyré: “The term ‘different’ is taken here in an active
sense.”

Writing “differing” or “differance” (with an a) would have had the utility
of making it possible to translate Hegel on precisely this point with no further
qualifications-and it is a quite decisive point in his text. The translation would
be, as it always should be, the transformation of one language by another. Nat-
urally, I maintain that the word “differance” can be used in other ways, too;
first of all, because it denotes not only the activity of primordial difference but
also the temporalizing detour of deferring. It has, however, an even more im-
portant usage. Despite the very profound affinities that differance thus written
has with Hegelian speech (as it should be read), it can, at a certain point, not ex-
actly break with it, but rather work a sort of displacement with regard to it. A
definite rupture with Hegelian language would make no sense, nor would it be
at all likely; but this displacement is both infinitesimal and radical. I have tried
to indicate the extent of this displacement elsewhere; it Would be difficult to
talk about it with any brevity at this point.

Differences are thus “produced”-differed-by,differance. But what dif-
fers, or who differs? In other words, what is differance? With this question we
attain another stage and another source of the problem.

What differs? Who differs? What is differance?

If we answered these questions even before examining them as questions,
even before going back over them and questioning their form (even what seems
to be most natural and necessary about them), we would fall below the level we
have now reached. ,For if we accepted the form of the question in its own sense
and syntax (“What?,” “What is?,” “Who is?”), we would have to admit that
differance is derived, supervenient, controlled, and ordered from the starting
point of a being-present, one capable of being something, a force, a state, or
power in the world, to which we could give all kinds of names: a what, or be-
ing-present as a sub/'ect, a who. In the latter case, notably, we would implicitly
admit that the being-present (for example, as a self-present being or conscious-
ness) would eventually result in differing: in delaying or in diverting the fulfill-

266

290 Jacques Derrida
ment of a “need” or “desire,” or in differing from itself. But in none of these
cases would such a being-present be “constituted” by this differance.

Now if we once again refer to the semiological difference, what was it that
Saussure in particular reminded us of? That “language [which consists only of
differences] is not a function of the speaking subject.” This implies that the sub-
ject (self-identical or even conscious of self-identity, self-conscious) is inscribed
in the language, that he is a “function” of the language. He becomes a speaking
subject only by conforming his speech-even in the aforesaid “creation,” even in
the aforesaid “transgression”-to the system of linguistic prescriptions taken as
the system of differences, or at least to the general law of differance, by conform-
ing to that law of language which Saussure calls “language without speech.”
“Language is necessary for the spoken word to be intelligible and so that it can
produce all of its effects.”10

If, by hypothesis, we maintain the strict opposition between speech and lan-
guage, then differance will be not only the play of differences within the lan-
guage but the relation of speech to language, the detour by which I must also
pass in order to speak, the silent token I must give, which holds just as well for
linguistics in the strict sense as it does for general semiology; it dictates all the
relations between usage and the formal schema, between the message and the
particular code, etc. Elsewhere I have tried to suggest that this differance within
language, and in the relation between speech and language, forbids the essential
dissociation between speech and writing that Saussure, in keeping with tradi-
tion, wanted to draw at another level of his presentation. The use of language
or the employment of any code which implies a play of forms-with no deter-
mined or invariable substratum-also presupposes a retention and protention
of differences, a spacing and temporalizing, a play of traces. This play must be a
sort of inscription prior to writing, a protowriting without a present origin,
without an arché. From this comes the systematic crossing-out of the arché and
the transformation of general semiology into a grammatology, the latter per-
forming a critical work upon everything within semiology-right down to its
matrical concept of signs-that retains any metaphysical presuppositions in-
compatible with the theme of differance.

We might be tempted by an objection: to be sure, the subject becomes a
speaking subject only by dealing with the system of linguistic differences; or
again, he becomes a signifying subject (generally by speech or other signs) only
by entering into the system of differences. In this sense, certainly, the speaking
or signifying subject would not be self-present, insofar as he speaks or signifies,
except for the play of linguistic or semiological differance. But can we not con-
ceive 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 therefore supposes thatprior to signs and outside them,
and excluding every trace and differance, something such as consciousness is
possible. It supposes, moreover, that, even before the distribution of its signs in

267

“Differance” 291
space and in the world, consciousness can gather itself up in its own presence.
What then is consciousness? What does “consciousness” mean? Most often in
the very form of “meaning” [“vouloir-dire”), consciousness in all its modifica-
tions is conceivable only as self-presence, a self-perception of presence. And
what holds for consciousness also holds here for what is called subjective exis-
tence in general. Just as the category of subject is not and never has been con-
ceivable without reference to presence as bypokeimenon or ousia, etc., so the
subject as consciousness has never been able to be evinced otherwise than as
self-presence. The privilege accorded to consciousness thus means a privilege
accorded to the present; and even if the transcendental temporality of con-
sciousness is described in depth, as Husserl described it, the power of synthesis
and of the incessant gathering-up of traces is always accorded to the “living
present.”

This privilege is the ether of metaphysics, the very element of our thought
insofar as it is caught up in the language of metaphysics. We can only de-limit
such a closure today by evoking this import of presence, which Heidegger has
shown to be the onto-theological determination of being. Therefore, in evoking
this import of presence, by an examination which would have to be of a quite
peculiar nature, we question the absolute privilege of this form or epoch of
presence in general, that is, consciousness as meaning [vouloir-dire] in self-
presence.

We thus come to posit presence-and, in particular, consciousness, the be-
ing-next-to-itself of consciousness-no longer as the absolutely matrical form
of being but as a “determination” and an “effect.” Presence is a determination
and effect within a system which is no longer that of presence but that of differ-
ance; it no more allows the opposition between activity and passivity than that
between cause and effect or in-determination and determination, etc. This sys-
tem is of such a kind that even to designate consciousneSs as an effect or de-
termination-for strategic reasons, reasons that can be more or less clearly
considered and systematically ascertained-is to continue to operate according
to the vocabulary of that very thing to be de-limited.

Before being so radically and expressly Heideggerian, this was also Nietzsche’s
and Freud’s move, both of Whom, as we know, and often in a very similar way,
questioned the self-assured certitude of consciousness. And is it not remarkable
that both of them did this by starting out with the theme of differance?

This theme appears almost literally in their work, at the most crucial places.
I shall not expand on this here; I shall only recall that for Nietzsche “the impor-
tant main activity is unconscious” and that consciousness is the effect of forces
whose essence, ways, and modalities are not peculiar to it. Now force itself is
never present; it is only a play of differences and quantities. There would be no
force in general without the difference between forces; and here the difference
in quantity counts more than the content of quantity, more than the absolute
magnitude itself.

268

292 Jacques Derrida

Quantity itself therefore is not separable from the difference in quantity. The

difference in quantity is the essence of force, the relation of force with force. To

fancy two equal forces, even if we grant them opposing directions, is an ap-

proximate and crude illusion, a statistical dream in which life is immersed, but

which chemistry dispels.11
Is not the whole thought of Nietzsche a critique of philosophy as active indiffer-
ence to difference, as a system of reduction or adiaphoristic repression? Follow-
ing the same logic-logic itself-this does not exclude the fact that philosophy
lives in and from differance, that it thereby blinds itself to the same, which is
not the identical. The same is precisely differance (with an a), as the diverted
and equivocal passage from one difference to another, from one term of the op-
position to the other. We could thus take up all the coupled oppositions on
which philosophy is constructed, and from which our language lives, not in or-
der to see opposition vanish but to see the emergence of a necessity such that
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). It is out of the unfolding of this “same”
as differance that the sameness of difference and of repetition is presented in the
eternal return.

In Nietzsche, these are so many themes that can be related with the kind of
symptomatology that always serves to diagnose the evasions and ruses of any-
thing disguised in its differance. Or again, these terms can be related with the
entire thematics of active interpretation, which substitutes an incessant deci-
phering for the disclosure of truth as a presentation of the thing itself in its pres-
ence, etc. What results is a cipher without truth, or at least a system of ciphers
that is not dominated by truth value, which only then becomes a function that is
understood, inscribed, and circumscribed.

We shall therefore call differance this “active” (in movement) discord of the
different forces and of the differences between forces which Nietzsche opposes
to the entire system of metaphysical grammar, wherever that system controls
culture, philosophy, and science.

It is historically significant that this diaphoristics, understood as an energet-
ics or an economy of forces, set up to question the primacy of presence qua con-
sciousness, is also‘the major theme of Freud’s thought; in his work we find
another diaphoristics, both in the form of a theory of ciphers or traces and an
energetics. The questioning of the authority of consciousness is first and always
differential.

The two apparently different meanings of differance are tied together in
Freudian theory: differing [le différer] as discernibility, distinction, deviation,

269

“Differance” 293
diastem, spacing; and deferring [le différer] as detour, delay, relay, reserve, tem-
poralizing. I shall recall only that:

1 . The concept of trace (Spur), of facilitation (Bahnung), of forces of facilita-
tion are, as early as the composition of the Entwurf, inseparable from the con-
cept of difference. The origin of memory and of the psyche as a memory in
general (conscious or unconscious) can only be described by taking into account
the difference between the facilitation thresholds, as Freud says explicitly. There
is no facilitation [Bahnung] Without difference and no difference without a trace.

2. All the differences involved in the production of unconscious traces and
in the process of inscription (Niederschrift) can also be interpreted as moments
of differance, in the sense of “placing on reserve.” Following a schema that
continually guides Freud’s thinking, the movement of the trace is described as
an effort of life to protect itself by deferring the dangerous investment, by con-
stituting a reserve (Vorrat). And all the conceptual oppositions that furrow
Freudian thought relate each concept to the other like movements of a detour,
Within the economy of differance. The one is only the other deferred, the one
differing from the other. The one is the other in differance, the one is the differ-
ance from the other. Every apparently rigorous and irreducible opposition (for
example, that between the secondary and primary) is thus said to be, at one
time or another, a “theoretical fiction.” In this way again, for example (but
such an example covers everything or communicates with everything), the dif-
ference between the pleasure principle and the reality principle is only differ-
ance as detour (Aufschieben, Aufschuh). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
Freud writes:

Under the influence of the ego’s instincts of self-preservation, the pleasure prin-

ciple is replaced by the reality principle. This latter principle does not abandon

the intention of ultimately obtaining pleasure, but it nevertheless demands and

carries into effect the postponement of satisfaction, the abandonment of a num-

ber of possibilities of gaining satisfaction and the temporary toleration of un-

pleasure as a step on the long indirect road (Aufschuh) to pleasure.12

Here we touch on the point of greatest obscurity, on the very enigma of dif-
ferance, on how the concept we have of it is divided by a strange separation. We
must not hasten to make a decision too quickly. How can we conceive of differ-
ance as a systematic detour which, Within the element of the same, always aims
at either finding again the pleasure or the presence that had been deferred by
(conscious or unconscious) calculation, and, at the same time, how can we, on
the other hand, conceive of differance as the relation to an impossible presence,
as an expenditure without reserve, as an irreparable loss of presence, an irre-
versible wearing-down of energy, or indeed as a death instinct and a relation to
the absolutely other that apparently breaks up any. economy? It is evident-it is
evidence itself-that system and nonsystem, the same and the absolutely other,
etc., cannot be conceived together.

270

294 Jacques Derrida

If differance is this inconceivable factor, must we not perhaps hasten to make
it evident, to bring it into the philosophical element of evidence, and thus quickly
dissipate its mirage character and illogicality, dissipate it with the infallibility of
the calculus we know well-since we have recognized its place, necessity, and
function within the structure of differance? What would be accounted for philo-
sophically here has already been taken into account in the system of differance as
it is here being calculated. I have tried elsewhere, in a reading of Bataille,13 to in-
dicate what might be the establishment of a rigorous, and in a new sense “scien-
tific,” relating of a “restricted economy”-one having nothing to do with an
unreserved expenditure, with death, with being exposed to nonsense, etc.-to a
“general economy” or system that, so to speak, takes account of what is unre-
served. It is a relation between a differance that is accounted for and a differance
that fails to be accounted for, where the establishment of a pure presence, without
loss, is one with the occurrence of absolute loss, with death. By establishing this
relation between a restricted and a general system, we shift and recommence the
very project of philosophy under the privileged heading of Hegelianism.

The economic character of differance in no way implies that the deferred
presence can always be recovered, that it simply amounts to an investment that
only temporarily and without loss delays the presentation of presence, that is,
the perception of gain or the gain of perception. Contrary to the metaphysical,
dialectical, and “Hegelian” interpretation of the economic movement of differ-
ance, we must admit a game where whoever loses wins and where one wins and
loses each time. If the diverted presentation continues to be somehow defini-
tively and irreducibly withheld, this is not because a particular present remains
hidden or absent, but because differance holds us in a relation with what ex-
ceeds (though we necessarily fail to recognize this) the alternative of presence or
absence. A certain alterity-Freud gives it a metaphysical name, the uncon-
scious-is definitively taken away from every process of presentation in which
we would demand for it to be shown forth in person. In this context and under
this heading, the unconscious is not, as we know, a hidden, virtual, and poten-
tial self-presence. It is differed-which no doubt means that it is woven out of
differences, but also that it sends out, that it delegates, representatives or prox-
ies; but there is no chance that the mandating subject “exists” somewhere, that
it is present or is “itself,” and still less chance that it will become conscious. In
this sense, contrary to the terms of an old debate, strongly symptomatic of the
metaphysical investments it has always assumed, the “unconscious” can no
more be classed as a “thing” than as anything else; it is no more of a thing than
an implicit or masked consciousness. This radical alterity, removed from every
possible mode of presence, is characterized by irreducible aftereffects, by de-
layed effects. In order to describe them, in order to read the traces of the “un-
conscious” traces (there are no “conscious” traces), the language of presence or
absence, the metaphysical speech of phenomenology, is in principle inadequate.

The structure of delay (retardement: Nachtrdglichkeit) that Freud talks
about indeed prohibits our taking temporalization (temporalizing) to be a sim-

271

“Differance” 295
ple dialectical complication of the present; rather, this is the style of transcen-
dental phenomenology. It describes the living present as a primordial and inces-
sant synthesis that is. constantly led back upon itself, back upon its assembled
and assembling self, by retentional traces and protentional openings. 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. The concept of trace is therefore incommensurate with that of reten-
tion, that of the becoming-past of what had been present. The trace cannot be
conceived-nor, therefore, can differance-on the basis of either the present or
the presence of the present.

A past that has never been present: with this formula Emmanuel Levinas
designates (in ways that are, to be sure, not those of psychoanalysis) the trace
and the enigma of absolute alterity, that is, the Other [autmi]. At least Within
these limits, and from this point of View, the thought of differance implies the
whole critique of classical ontology undertaken by Levinas. And the concept of
trace, like that of differance, forms-across these different traces and through
these differences between traces, as understood by Nietzsche, Freud, and Levinas
(these “authors’ names” serve only as indications)-the network that sums up
and permeates our “epoch” as the de-limitation of ontology (of presence).

The ontology of presence is the ontology of beings and beingness. Every-
where, the dominance of beings is solicited by differance-in the sense that sollz'c-
itare means, in old Latin, to shake all over, to make the whole tremble. What is
questioned by the thought of differance, therefore, is the determination of being
in presence, or in beingness. Such a question could not arise and be understood
without the difference between Being and beings opening up somewhere. The first
consequence of this is that differance is not. It is not a being-present, however ex-
cellent, unique, principal, or transcendent one makes it. It commands nothing,
rules over nothing, and nowhere does it exercise any authority. It is not marked
by a capital letter. Not only is there no realm of differance, but differance is even
the subversion of every realm. This is obviously What makes it threatening and
necessarily dreaded by everything in us that desires a realm, the past or future
presence of a realm. And it is always in the name of a realm that, believing one
sees it ascend to the capital letter, one can reproach it for wanting to rule.

Does this mean, then, that differance finds its place Within the spread of the
ontic-ontological difference, as it is conceived, as the “epoch” conceives itself
within it, and particularly “across” the Heideggerian meditation, which cannot
be gotten around?

There is no simple answer to such a question.

In one particular respect, differance is, to be sure, but the historical and
epochal deployment of Being or of the ontological difference. The a of differ-
ance marks the movement of this deployment.

And yet, is not the thought that conceives the sense or truth of Being, the
determination of differance, as antic-ontological difference-difference con-

272

296 Jacques Derrida

ceived within the horizon of the question of Being-still an intrametaphysical
effect of differance? Perhaps the deployment of differance is not only the truth
or the epochality of Being. Perhaps we must try to think this unheard-of
thought, this silent tracing, namely, that the history of Being (the thought of
which is committed to the Greco-Western logos), as it is itself produced across
the ontological difference, is only one epoch of the diapherein. Then we could
no longer even call it an “epoch,” for the concept of epochality belongs within
history understood as the history of Being. Being has always made “sense,” has
always been conceived or spoken of as such, only by dissimulating itself in be-
ings; thus, in a particular and very strange way, differance (is) “older” than the
ontological difference or the truth of Being. In this age it can be called the play
of traces. It is a trace that no longer belongs to the horizon of Being but one
whose sense of Being is borne and bound by this play; it is a play of traces or
differance that has no sense and is not, a play that does not belong. There is no
support to be found and no depth to be had for this bottomless chessboard
where being is set in play.

It is perhaps in this way that the Heraclitean play of the hen diapheron
heauto’i, of the one differing from itself, of what is in difference with itself,
already becomes lost as a trace in determining the diapherein as ontological
difference.

To think through the ontological difference doubtless remains a difficult
task, a task Whose statement has remained nearly inaudible. And to prepare
ourselves for venturing beyond our own logos, that is, for a differance so vio-
lent that it refuses to be stopped and examined as the epochality of Being and
ontological difference, is neither to give up this passage through the truth of Be-
ing, nor is it in any way to “criticize,” “contest,” or fail to recognize the inces-
sant necessity for it. On the contrary, we must stay within the difficulty of this
passage; we must repeat this passage in a rigorous reading of metaphysics,
wherever metaphysics serves as the norm of Western speech, and not only in the
texts of “the history of philosophy.” Here we must allow the trace of whatever
goes beyond the truth of Being to appear/disappear in its fully rigorous way. It
is a trace of something that can never present itself; it is itself a trace that can
never be presented, that is, can never appear and manifest itself as such in its
phenomenon. It is a trace that lies beyond What profoundly ties fundamental
ontology to phenomenology. Like differance, the trace is never presented as
such. In presenting itself it becomes effaced; in being sounded it dies away, like
the writing of the a, inscribing its pyramid in differance.

We can always reveal the precursive and secretive traces of this movement
in metaphysical speech, especially in the contemporary talk about the closure of
ontology, i.e., through the various attempts we have looked at (Nietzsche,
Freud, Levinas)-and particularly in Heidegger’s work.

The latter provokes us to question the essence of the present, the presence
of the present.

What is the present? What is it to conceive the present in its presence?

273

“Differance” 297

Let us consider, for example, the 1946 text entitled “Der Spurch des Anaxi-
mander.” Heidegger there recalls that the forgetting of Being forgets about the
difference between Being and beings:

But the point of Being (die Sache des Seins) is to be the Being of beings. The lin-

guistic form of this enigmatic and multivalent genitive designates a genesis

(Genesis), a provenance (Herkunft) of the present from presence (des Anwe-

senden aus dem Anwesen). But with the unfolding of these two, the essence

(Wesen) of this provenance remains hidden (verhorgen). Not only is the essence

of this provenance not thought out, but neither is the simple relation between

presence and present (Anwesen and Anwesenden). Since the dawn, it seems that

presence and being-present are each separately something. Imperceptibly, pres-
ence becomes itself a present. . . . The essence of presence (Das Wesen des An-
wesens), and thus the difference between presence and present, is forgotten.

The forgetting of Being is the forgetting of the difference between Being and

beings. 14

In recalling the difference between Being and beings (the ontological differ-
ence) as the difference between presence and present, Heidegger puts forward a
proposition, indeed, a group of propositions; it is not our intention here to idly
or hastily “criticize” them but rather to convey them with all their provocative
force.

Let us then proceed slowly. What Heidegger wants to point out is that the
difference between Being and beings, forgotten by metaphysics, has disappeared
without leaving a trace. The very trace of difference has sunk from sight. If we
admit that difference (is) (itself) something other than presence and absence, if
it traces, then we are dealing with the forgetting of the difference (between Be-
ing and beings), and we now have to talk about a disappearance of the trace’s
trace. This is certainly what this passage from “Der Spruch des Anaximander”
seems to imply:

The forgetting of Being is a part of the very essence of Being, and is concealed

by it. The forgetting belongs so essentially to the destination of Being that the

dawn of this destination begins precisely as an unconcealment of the present in

its presence. This means: the history of Being begins by the forgetting of Being,

in that Being retains its essence, its difference from beings. Difference is want-

ing; it remains forgotten. Only what is differentiated-the present and presence

(das Anwesende und das Anwesen)-becomes uncovered, but not insofar as it

is differentiated. On the contrary, the matinal trace (die friihe Spur) of differ-

ence effaces itself from the moment that presence appears as a being-present

(das Anwesen wie ein Anwesendes erscheint) and finds its provenance in a

supreme (being)-present (in einem hochsten Anwesen-den).15

The trace is not a presence but is rather the simulacrum of a presence that
dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself. The trace has, properly speaking,

274

298 Jacques Derrida

no place, for effacement belongs to the very structure of the trace. Effacement
must always be able to overtake the trace; otherwise it would not be a trace but
an indestructible and monumental substance. In addition, and from the start,
effacement constitutes it as a trace-effacement establishes the trace in a change
of place and makes it disappear in its appearing, makes it issue forth from itself
in its very position. The effacing of this early trace (die friihe Spur) of difference
is therefore “the same” as its tracing within the text of metaphysics. This meta-
physical text must have retained a mark of what it lost or put in reserve, set
aside. In the language of metaphysics the paradox of such a structure is the in-
version of the metaphysical concept which produces the following effect: the
present becomes the sign of signs, the trace of traces. It is no longer what every
reference refers to in the last instance; it becomes a function in a generalized ref-
erential structure. It is a trace, and a trace of the effacement of a trace.

In this way the metaphysical text is understood; it is still readable, and re-
mains to be read. It proposes both the monument and the mirage of the trace,
the trace as simultaneously traced and effaced, simultaneously alive and dead,
alive as always to simulate even life in its preserved inscription; it is a pyramid.

Thus we think through, without contradiction, or at least without granting
any pertinence to such contradiction, what is perceptible and imperceptible
about the trace. The “matinal trace” of difference is lost in an irretrievable
invisibility, and yet even its loss is covered, preserved, regarded, and retarded.
This happens in a text, in the form of presence.

Having spoken about the effacement of the matinal trace, Heidegger can
thus, in this contradiction without contradiction, consign or countersign the
sealing of the trace. We read on a little further:

The difference between Being and beings, however, can in turn be experienced

as something forgotten only if it is already discovered with the presence of the

present (mit dem Anwesen des Anwesenden) and if it is thus sealed in a trace (so

eine Spur gepriz'gt hat) that remains preserved (gewahrt bleibt) in the language
which Being appropriates.16

Further on still, while meditating upon Anaximander’s To Xpeaiv, translated
as Branch (sustaining use), Heidegger writes the following:

Dispensing accord and deference (Pug and Rack verfiigend), our sustaining use

frees the present (das Anwesende) in its sojourn and sets it free every time for its

sojourn. But by the same token the present is equally seen to be exposed to the
constant danger of hardening in the insistence (in das blosse Beharren ver-
ht'z'rtet) out of its sojourning duration. In this way sustaining use (Branch)
remains itself and at the same time an abandonment (Aushz’indigung: handing-
over) of presence (des Anwesens) in den Un-fug, to discord (disjointedness).
Sustaining use joins together the dis- (Der Branch fiigt das Un-).17
275

“Differance” 299

And it is at the point where Heidegger determines sustaining use as trace that
the question must be asked: can we, and how far can we, think of this trace and
the dis- of differance as Wesen des Seins? Doesn’t the dis of differance refer us be-
yond the history of Being, beyond our language as well, and beyond everything
that can be named by it? Doesn’t it call for-in the language of being-the neces-
sarily violent transformation of this language by an entirely different language?

Let us be more precise here. In order to dislodge the “trace” from its cover
(and whoever believes that one tracks down some thingE-one tracks down
tracks), let us continue reading this passage:

The translation of To xpea’w by “sustaining use” (Branch) does not derive from

cogitations of an etymologico-lexical nature. The choice of the word “sustain-

ing use” derives from an antecedent translation (Ubersetzen) of the thought

that attempts to conceive difference in the deployment of Being (im Wesen des

Seins) toward the historical beginning of the forgetting of Being. The word

“sustaining use” is dictated to thought in the apprehension (Erfakrung) of the

forgetting of Being. To xpedw properly names a trace (Spur) of what remains to

be conceived in the word “sustaining use,” a trace that quickly disappears (als-

bald verscbwindet) into the history of Being, in its world-historical unfolding as

Western metaphysics.18

How do we conceive of the outside of a text? How, for example, do we con-
ceive of what stands opposed to the text of Western metaphysics? To be sure, the
“trace that quickly disappears into the history of Being, . . . as Western meta-
physics,” escapes all the determinations, all the names it might receive in the
metaphysical text. The trace is sheltered and thus dissimulated in these names; it
does not appear in the text as the trace “itself.” But this is because the trace itself
could never itself appear as such. Heidegger also says that differance can never
appear as such: “Lichtung des Unterschiedes kann deshalb' auch nicht bedeuten,
dass der Unterschied als der Unterschied erscheint.” There is no essence of differ-
ance; not only can it not allow itself to be taken up into the as such of its name or
its appearing, but it threatens the authority of the as such in general, the thing’s
presence in its essence. That there is no essence of difference at this point also im-
plies that there is neither Being nor truth to the play of writing, insofar as it in-
volves differance.

For us, differance remains a metaphysical name; and all the names that it
receives from our language are still, so far as they are names, metaphysical. This
is particularly so when they speak of determining differance as the difference
between presence and present. (Anwesen/Anwesend), but already and especially
so when, in the most general way, they speak of determining differance as the
difference between Being and beings.

“Older” than Being itself, our language has no name for such a differance.
But we “already know” that if it is unnamable, this is not simply provisional; it
is not because our language has still not found or received this name, or because

276

300 Jacques Derrida

we would have to look for it in another language, outside the finite system of
our language. It is because there is no name for this, not even essence or Being-
nor even the name “differance,” which is not a name, which is not a pure nomi-
nal unity, and continually breaks up in a chain of different substitutions.

“There is no name for this”: we read this as a truism. What is unnamable
here is not some ineffable being that cannot be approached by a name; like
God, for example. What is unnamable is the play that brings about the nominal
effects, the relatively unitary or atomic structures we call names, or chains of
substitutions for names. In these, for example, the nominal effect of “differ-
ance” is itself involved, carried off, and reinscribed, just as the false beginning
or end of a game is still part of the game, a function of the system.

What we do know, what we could know if it were simply a question of
knowing, is that there never has been and never will be a unique word, a master
name. This is why thinking about the letter a of differance is not the primary
prescription, nor is it the prophetic announcement of some imminent and still
unheard-of designation. There is nothing kerygmatic about this “word” so long
as we can perceive its reduction to a lower-case letter.

There will be no unique name, not even the name of Being. It must be con-
ceived without nostalgia; that is, it must be conceived outside the myth of the
purely maternal or paternal language belonging to the lost fatherland of thought.
On the contrary, we must affirm it-in the sense that Nietzsche brings affirmation
into play-with a certain laughter and with a certain dance.

After this laughter and dance, after this affirmation that is foreign to any di-
alectic, the question arises as to the other side of nostalgia, which I call Heideg-
gerian hope. I am not unaware that this term may be somewhat shocking. I
venture it all the same, without excluding any of its implications, and shall re-
late it to what seems to me to be retained of metaphysics in “Der Spruch des
Anaximander,” namely, the quest for the proper word and the unique name. In
talking about the “first word of Being” (das friibe Wort des Seins: To Xpea’w),
Heidegger writes,

The relation to the present, unfolding its order in the very essence of presence,

is unique (ist eine einzige). It is pre-eminently incomparable to any other rela-

tion; it belongs to the uniqueness of Being itself (Sie gebort zur Einzigkeit des

Seins selbst). Thus, in order to name what is deployed in Being (das Wesende

des Seins), language will have to find a single word, the unique word (ein ein-

ziges, das einzige Wort). There we see how hazardous is every word of thought

(every thoughtful word: denkende Wort) that addresses itself to Being (das dem

Sein zugesprocben wird). What is hazarded here, however, is not something

impossible, because Being speaks through every language; everywhere and

always.”

Such is the question: the marriage between speech and Being in the unique
word, in the finally proper name. Such is the question that enters into the affir-

277

“Differance” 301
mation put into play by differance. The question bears (upon) each of the words
in this sentence: “Being / speaks / through every language; / everywhere and
always

NOTES

1. [The reader should bear in mind that “differance,” or difference with an a, incorva
rates two significations: “to differ” and “to defer.”-Translator.]

2. [For the term “facilitation” (frayage) in Freud, cf. “Project for a Scientific Psychology
1” in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (New York and Lon’
don: Macmillan, 1964), I, 300, note 4 by the translator, James Strachey: “The word
‘facilitation’ as a rendering of the German ‘Bahnung’ seems to have been introduced
by Sherrington a few years after the Project was written. The German word, however,
was already in use.” The sense that Derrida draws upon here is stronger in the French
or German; that is, the opening-up or clearing-out of a pathway. In the cOntext of the
“Project for a Scientific Psychology 1,” facilitation denotes the conduction capability
that results from a difference in resistance levels in the memory and perception cirv
cuits of the nervous system. Thus, lowering the resistance threshold of a contact bar-
rier serves to “open up” a nerve pathway and “facilitates” the excitatory process for the
circuit. Cf. also I. Derrida, L’Ecriture et la clifférence, Chap. VII, “Freud et la scene de
l’écriture” (Paris: Seuil, 1967), esp. pp. 297-305 .-Translator.]

3. [On “pyramid” and “tomb” see]. Derrida, “Le Puits et la pyramide” in Hegel et la pensée
madame (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970), esp. pp. 44-45.-Translator.]

4. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cow's de linguistique générale, ed. C. Bally and A. Sechehaye
(Paris: Payot, 1916); English translation by Wade Baskin, Course in General Linguistics
(New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), pp. 117-18, 120.

5. Course in General Linguistics, p. 18.

6. [On “supplement” see above, Speech and Phenomena, Chap. 7, pp. 88-104. Cf. also
Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967). On “pharmalcon” see
Derrida, “La Pharmacie de Platon,” Tel Quel, No. 32 (Winter, 1967). PP. 17-59; No.
33 (Spring, 1968), pp. 4-48. On “hymen” see Derrida, “La Double séance,” Tel Quel,
No. 41 (Spring, 1970), pp. 3-43; No. 42 (Summer, 1970), pp. 3-45. “La Pharmacie de
Platon” and “La Double séance” have been reprinted in a recent text of Derrida, La
Dissemination (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972).-Translator.]

7. [Derrida often brackets or “crosses out” certain key terms taken from metaphysics and
logic, and in doing this, he follows Heidegger’s usage in Zur Seinsfrage. The terms in
question no longer have their full meaning, they no longer have the status of a purely
signified content of expression-no longer, that is, after the deconstruction of meta
physics. Generated out of the play of differance, they still retain a vestigial trace of
‘sense, however, a trace that cannot simply be gotten around (incontourable). An ex-
tensive discussion of all this is to be found in De la grammatolog'ie, pp. 31-40.-Trans«
lator.]

8. Alexandre Koyré, “Hegel a léna,” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuse, XIV
(1934), 420-58; reprinted in Koyré, Etudes d’histoire de la pensée philosophique (Paris:
Armand Colin, 1961), pp. 135-73.

278