Différance

Différance is a French term coined by Jacques Derrida, deliberately homophonous with the word "différence". Différance plays on the fact that the French word différer means both "to defer" and "to differ."

Derrida first uses the term différance in his 1963 paper "Cogito et histoire de la folie". The term différance then played a key role in Derrida's engagement with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl in Speech and Phenomena. The term was then elaborated in various other works, notably in his essay "Différance" and in various interviews collected in Positions.

The ‹a› of différance is a deliberate "misspelling" of différence, though the two are pronounced identically . This highlights the fact that its written form is not heard, and serves to further subvert the traditional privileging of speech over writing (see archi-writing), as well as the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible. The difference articulated by the ‹a› in différance is not apparent to the senses via sound, "but neither cannot it belong to intelligibility, to the ideality which is not fortuitously associated with the objectivity of theorein or understanding." This is because the language of understanding is already caught up in sensible metaphors ("theory," for instance, in Greek, means "to see").

In the essay "Différance" Derrida indicates that différance gestures at a number of heterogeneous features that govern the production of textual meaning. The first (relating to deferral) is the notion that words and signs can never fully summon forth what they mean, but can only be defined through appeal to additional words, from which they differ. Thus, meaning is forever "deferred" or postponed through an endless chain of signifiers. The second (relating to difference, sometimes referred to as espacement or "spacing") concerns the force that differentiates elements from one another and, in so doing, engenders binary oppositions and hierarchies that underpin meaning itself.

Derrida developed the concept of différance deeper in the course of an argument against the phenomenology of Husserl, who sought a rigorous analysis of the role of memory and perception in our understanding of sequential items such as music or language. Derrida's différance argues that because the perceiver's mental state is constantly in a state of flux and differs from one re-reading to the next, a general theory describing this phenomenon is unachievable.