Nothing Outside the Text: Derrida and Brandom 49 différance which opens appearance [l’apparaître] and signification” (Derrida 1976, 65).4 The trace, for Derrida, is something that is absent but that has left its mark; the trace has effects even when it is no longer present. If you have found this material useful, please give credit to. The latter term has an a for the seventh letter and a diacritical mark above the fifth letter. With writing as his basis (t… Thus, for Derrida, the sign marks an absent presence, because rather than present the object, we employ the sign whose meaning is always deferred because the thing represented is always absent. Derrida also had the gift of seizing on detail and spinning out his observations into thoughts and thoughts into positions. Trace is the absent part of the sign’s presence. Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. This essay, given first as a talk at the Socieété française de philosophie in January of 1968, was published in the summer of the same year in Théorie d’ensemble, a Tel Quel enterprise. Derrida explains that difference is the condition for the opposition of presence and absence. Essentially and lawfully, every concept is inscribed to a chain or in a systematic play of differences. Without a retention in the minimal unit of temporal experience, without a trace retaining the other as other in the same, no difference would do … For Lévi-Strauss, writing was an instrument of oppression, colonizing the “primitive” mind (nature) with culture,and for him structuralism for was nothing less than a search for the universal structures  of human intelligence. This structure is a set of unconscious rules that both structures a culture and expresses the infrastructure of speech (and writing) through a language system. The trace is an important notion in Derrida’s philosophy of language because it is closely connected to the way that writing relies on differences. That said, différence exists in what Derrida called temporization or suspended in time or temporization and in space, meaning the to express this suspension between the “becoming time of space” and the “becoming space of time.” The “a” compensates, as he said, for the resulting loss of meaning and that this compensation is “economical.” Différence, within the structure of paired opposites, is to differ, to be the other to a term, and therefore the difference is to defer, to delay, to postpone what is an endlessly deferring meaning. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! He argued that because language uses codes (signs) there is always a play of forms which assumes differences which are retained as traces. The “surface” of the human mind is the unconscious, once a virgin surface, which retains permanent traces, or memory which can be energized into consciousness and affect the thinking subject. "Originary trace" is Derrida's alternative to "presence," playing an analogous role within a different approach to the problem of the He takes a lead from the Swiss linguist Ferdinand Saussure (1857-1913), who maintained that words derive their meaning from other words, and that meanings work by differences not similarity. … “Tomb” (oikēsis) in Greek is linked to “house” (oikos)which in turn is linked to “economy” in what he called an “economy of death.” The “a” exists in an intermediary zone, neither speech nor writing, because this letter, this non-sound cannot be represented (spoken/heard) through the senses. For Derrida the play of difference made it impossible to separate speech and writing. The bulk of Derrida’s writing is about language, his entry point into philosophy. To “disperse” is a spatial operation, to “defer” is temporal, a pair of operations that is compensated for by the “a.” Therefore, différAnce is productive, constituting causality–cause and effect–différance is neither word or a concept. While Derrida woul… Therefore, writing is the most primordial activity of differentiation, a pre-vocal process that operates to inaugurate language, … 186-205 (‘The Infrastructure as Arche-Trace’, ‘The Infrastructure as Difference’), pp. Saussure’s notion of différence as a spatial one–terms are laid out in a system, positioned as opposites and pairs, but Derrida deployed the “a” to make the point that différance is temporal because each sign carries within it the trace of other other. The late sixties and early seventies were marked by a series of career-making articles in which Derrida systematically and laboriously re-read and reinterpreted European philosophy. As Saussure noted, “..in language there are only differences.” Derrida stated that these differences play a role in language and have distinct effects. Dr. Spivak pivots from analyzing Derrida’s vocabulary to exploring his relationship with Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger; she also explores the antagonistic relationship Derrida had with Foucault. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 24; cf. Ever fond of reversals, Derrida proposed that writing, a non-being, emerges out of silence, a necessary non-being that precedes being. According to Derrida, différance and anti-trace are the same. http://www.egs.edu/ Diane Davis, rhetorician and post-structuralist thinker, continues with her course on the thought of Jacques Derrida. Derrida found “play” or oscillation between terms to be of great importance. With no possibility of locating a transcendental signifier or point of origin or end, Derrida has deconstructed Saussure’s system of language. I will speak of the letter a, this initial letter which it apparently has been necessary to insinuate, here and there, into the writing of the word difference; and to do so in the course of a writing on writing, and also of a writing within writhing, whose different trajectories thereby find themselves, at certain very determined points, intersecting with a kind of gross spelling mistake, a lapse in the discipline and law which regulate writing and keep it seemly. Derrida likened the deferral of difference to the “structure of delay” present in Freudian theory, a delay (Nachträglichkeit), explaining that the concept of the “trace” forbids retention (memory) because its past is always present. Because Derrida’s writing concerns auto-bio-graphy(writing about one’s life as a form of relation to oneself),many of his writings are auto-biographical. Logically, this reversal introduces the trace which exists as a force and formation of writing: the trace as an already-there precondition that precedes. Jacques Derrida's theory of the sign fits into the poststructuralist movement, which runs counter to Saussurean structuralism (the legacy of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure). He was also born into an environment of some discrimination. Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. To counter the pervasiveness of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ in Western Philosophy – Derrida uses the neologism ‘Differance’ – a playful combination of ‘differ’ and ‘to defer’, to demonstrate that the meaning of a linguistic sign is the simultaneous operation of distinction and temporality. For example, we notice that a triangle differs from a square. In considering how human beings develop ideas or discourses, Lévi-Strauss imagined or proposed the creation of culture through a cultural character inspired by his own father, a bricoleur,  a handy person, an engineer, a fabricator, who used everything at hand to create structures–myths, stories, accounts–to explain events. Derrida declares that “The trace is not a presence but is rather the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself.” 24 Moreover, the trace Difference before unity, before identity. Categories: Linguistics, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Uncategorized, Tags: aporias, Deconstruction, differance, Jacques Derrida. Lévi-Strauss based his structural anthropology upon Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1913) and considered that this structure of the mind operated in terms of opposition that, he thought, was necessary for any culture in order to make the world comprehensible. Différance is a word created by Derrida to explain a concept where opposites interact and meaning becomes unstable. Thus black is not a clear concept without white, up without down, etc. Différance is typical of his poetic excess and opens with. Therefore like Being, the trace must be placed sous rature. Laruelle believes (Laruelle 2010a) that with the philosophy of deconstruction, Derrida restores the identity of difference on a kind of meta-level. Unless we can learn to read the necessity of this a priori absent, insignificant difference, Derrida’s writing will remain bewildering. Meaning as a result is always endlessly deferred because there can be no final resting place for the sign which moves along a chain of signifiers. She surveys key Derridean vocabulary: differance, trace, the practice of putting certain terms “under erasure” (sous rature), and her interaction with the history of metaphysics. Words often have opposites which, far from being independent terms, need the other to complete the definition. The trace or what Derrida called the “arche-trace” is the formation of writing and of the difference that takes place in the sign. It other words, that which is to be signified (meant, expressed) must precede that a which is the signifier. Maintaining that the signifier (the form of a sign) refers directly to the signified (the content of a sign), structuralist theory has passed down a whole current of logocentric (speech-centred) thought that originated in the time of Plato. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent. To uncover the logic of the trace, one must deconstruct a text. This play of differences preexist language itself which has no origin. The trace or what Derrida called the “arche-trace” is the formation of writing and of the difference that takes place in the sign. If you have found this material useful, please give credit to Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. One of the very many difficulties of expressing Jacques Derrida's project (deconstruction) in simple terms is the enormous scale of it. © Art History Unstuffed. Differance has become a prominent concept in the parlance of all the major theories of the post 1960 period — Derrida’s concept of “ecriture”, Lacan’s concept of the ‘inalienable split” that inhabits the self, in its longing for the lost and unattainable wholeness, Cixous’ “ecriture feminine”, are all marked by difference, thereby giving rise to multitudes of meanings in each aspect.