Derrida on Difference

Quote

"Différance is not, does not exist, is not a present-being (on) in any form."

— Jacques Derrida, "Différance" (1968), collected in Margins of Philosophy

The quotation is often glossed by Derrida's accompanying insistence that differance is "neither a word nor a concept." In the 1968 lecture of the same name, Derrida introduced this unpronounceable term — a silent alteration of the French différence — to name something that conditions every word and every concept while itself remaining irreducible to either.

Historical Context

Derrida delivered the lecture "Différance" on January 27, 1968, before the Societe francaise de philosophie. The choice of venue was significant: this was the establishment of French philosophy, the same audience that had hosted Husserl and Bergson, and Derrida used the occasion to unsettle the very assumptions about language, meaning, and presence that the philosophical tradition took for granted. The lecture came at the height of Derrida's most fertile period, just a year after the triple publication of Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology, and Writing and Difference in 1967. The essay was later collected in Margins of Philosophy (1972), translated into English by Alan Bass in 1982.

The term differance was born from a pun that only works in writing. In French, the words différence and différance are pronounced identically; the distinction between them is visible on the page but inaudible in speech. This was no accident. Derrida had been reading Husserl's phenomenology, which privileged the voice as the medium of pure self-presence — the sense that when I speak, my meaning is fully present to me in a way that it can never be when I write. By inventing a term that can be seen but not heard, Derrida staged an attack on what he called "phonocentrism," the Western privilege of speech over writing. The silent a in differance is a mark of writing that speech cannot capture, a graphic event that disrupts the alleged immediacy of the voice. The year 1968 is also resonant for other reasons: the student uprisings of May '68 would erupt just months after the lecture, and while Derrida was never aMovement philosopher in the manner of Sartre, the spirit of upheaval that defined the period is not absent from his deconstruction of the philosophical establishment.

Philosophical Interpretation

To understand why differance is "neither a word nor a concept," it helps to see what Derrida means by each. A word is a linguistic sign — a unit of language that functions by being repeatable and by differing from other signs. A concept is a general meaning that a word expresses, the intelligible content that the mind grasps when it understands the word. Both words and concepts, Derrida argues, depend on something more basic that they cannot fully contain: the play of difference and deferral that makes signification possible in the first place. Every sign means what it means only by differing from other signs (spatial difference), and its meaning is always deferred, never fully present, because it depends on other signs that are themselves deferred (temporal deferral). Differance names this double structure — differing and deferring — that is the condition of possibility for every word and every concept.

The reason differance is itself neither a word nor a concept is that it cannot be made into a stable sign with a determinate meaning. If it were a concept, it would have to be present to a consciousness as a fixed, identifiable content — but differance names the very structure that prevents any content from being fully present. If it were a word, it would have to function as a repeatable sign within the system of language — but it names the system's constitutive instability, the movement that makes the system possible while preventing it from closing. Differance is therefore what Derrida calls a "quasi-concept" or a "quasi-condition": not a foundation in the traditional sense (a stable ground on which everything else rests) but a non-ground, an opening that cannot itself be presentified. When Derrida says it "does not exist" and "is not a present-being," he means that it is not a thing among things, not an entity that could be pointed to and said "there it is." It is the movement, the spacing and temporalizing, in which all things appear.

The silent a that distinguishes differance from difference is the visible mark of this structure. Because the difference between the two words cannot be heard, it can only be encountered in writing — which is precisely the medium that the philosophical tradition, following Plato and Rousseau, has treated as a derivative, secondary representation of the fullness of speech. Derrida's point is that this supposedly secondary medium reveals something about language that speech conceals: that meaning is not grounded in the self-presence of the voice but in the differential play of signs, a play that is always already at work, even in speech. The trace of the silent a — present in writing, absent in speech — is an emblem of the trace that, Derrida argues, structures every sign: every present meaning is marked by the traces of absent others that constitute it. This is why differance cannot be present: it is the very movement of the trace, the differing-deferring that makes presence possible while ensuring that presence is never pure.

Related Concepts

The concept of differance is the hinge on which several of Derrida's key ideas turn. The trace, which Derrida develops at length in Of Grammatology, is the mark that every sign carries of the other signs it is not; differance is the movement that produces traces. The supplement, explored in Derrida's reading of Rousseau, describes the paradox of a "second" that both adds to and reveals the lack in a supposed "first"; this logic of the supplement is a direct consequence of differance, since the deferral of full presence means that what presents itself as complete always requires supplementation. Logocentrism, the Western privilege of presence, speech, and origin, is the metaphysical system that differance unsettles from within. Together, these concepts constitute the vocabulary of deconstruction.

The quotation also connects Derrida to the broader currents of postmodernism and post-structuralism, which challenged the structuralist ambition to map language as a closed system of differences. Where structuralists like Saussure treated difference as a static relation within a synchronic system, Derrida's differance insists that the system is never closed: the deferral of meaning ensures that the structure is always in movement, always open to what it cannot contain. This has implications for any theory of meaning: if differance is at work, meaning is never simply present to be decoded but is always in transit, always promised and postponed.

Learning Path

To deepen your understanding of Derrida's concept of differance, consider the following path:

1. Start with the thinker: Read the full Derrida page to understand his biography, the method of deconstruction, and the network of concepts — trace, supplement, logocentrism — that surround differance.
2. Explore the philosophical background: Derrida's critique of presence is directed at phenomenology, especially Husserl's ideal of pure self-presence in consciousness. Understanding this target clarifies what differance is meant to displace.
3. Connect to meaning and knowledge: If meaning is always deferred, then knowledge can never achieve the total transparency that the tradition sought. Explore how differance reshapes the relationship between meaning, truth, and the limits of language.
4. Compare with postmodernism: Derrida resists the label, but his work intersects with postmodernism in its skepticism toward foundational claims. Comparing his deconstruction with other post-structural thinkers (Foucault, Deleuze) reveals what is distinctive about his approach.
5. Read the primary source: The essay "Différance" is collected in Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass (University of Chicago Press, 1982). It is dense but self-contained and is the indispensable starting point for the concept.

Sources

1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Jacques Derrida." Covers differance, the trace, the supplement, and Derrida's engagement with phenomenology and the metaphysics of presence.
2. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). The English collection containing the essay "Différance," along with related essays on the trace, the supplement, and deconstruction.