Derrida

Being completely honest up front, I had some trouble interpreting Derrida’s message (or several messages?) throughout his essay. I feel that Tuesday’s lecture will clear some things up for me, though I can only hope. As I read Derrida’s essay, confusion aside, I felt that Derrida and Locke would have an interesting bit of dialogue. Would Derrida and Locke agree upon Locke’s assertion that language restricts communication, often causing misinterpretation based on personal experience? I feel that Derrida would reinforce some of Locke’s notions that language cannot be universally interpreted. Just in the two terms that are being discussed (difference / difference – still need more explanation beyond this text on these) Locke would confirm that these two terms can quite easily be mistaken for each other, based on the difference of just a single letter – a, and not the literal meanings of the terms.

In his essay titled “Difference,” Derrida goes about describing what he sees as a process of temporal and spatial movement that he believes makes all thought and all reality a possibility. The “form” is introduced as an external element that shapes material into a specific or particular identity. All elements of language have what we label as “identity,” and that each element will itself consist of differentiations. Derrida set about demonstrating that ideas are units of language and are generated by difference; or that they have no substantial contrast apart from the networks that generate them as effects. But what does this really mean? Does Derrida mean that language and the processes that we use to generate language do not have a presence? Something palpable and graspable? According to Derrida, like in forms, they are completely empty and non-present.

In his essay, Derrida brings two “axes” to the table that “relate to the work of difference that produces presence as an effect that the mind then mistakenly assumes is a substance that guarantees truthfulness.” He claims that the first of his two axes is the concept of Time. He argues that the passing moment can never legitimately be grasped because the present moment is constantly passing away. Essentially, Derrida claimed that “presence is shadowed by the death of presence, its shuttling past the mind into oblivion of the past. Similarly, any current present moment bears in it the future present moments toward which it is moving.” Derrida believed that the differences between these “presents” constitute the “present” we attempt to grasp as something substantive before our minds. The second of the axes was what Derrida considered the concept of Space. Derrida believed that any spatially locatable object of thought or idea has an identity or presence of its own by differing from other things. Derrida claimed that his coined term differance was neither a word nor a concept. He believed that in the term we would see the “juncture rather than the summation.”