Derrida

The first thing you have to come to "Differance" understanding is Derrida's belief that spatially and temporally everything is defined by everything else in the sense that it isn't anything but itself. Much of the time, the definition of a thing somehow includes an implied past and future but those are entirely different objects that, once they are upon us and once they have passed, have created other webs of opposition which substantiate, contextualize, and render them whole. If we are to understand reality this way, then we must rid ourselves of the idea that something stands on its own (has its own single objectivity), we must rid ourselves of the notion that there is an observable present moment or idea that can be isolated, and we must accept that difference (the state of being different, the results of difference[s], and the interaction between differences) is the only thing which defines and connects concepts.

That's huge because, as he points out through Saussure, people like to think of things as substantive units by themselves which create binary oppositions when they are put into different contexts. Not only do binary oppositions not exist to Derrida (because oppositions are much more irreducibly complex than a binary system) but all language represents are hollow ideas that are filled out through relationships, not through having a self.

Basically, he would define a sentence not by the words or the letters but by the spaces between them which differentiate them (in space and time because you have a physical separation of parts and because you pause at each gap to cue yourself that a new part is beginning thus separating each part further in time). The idea of "differance" though is unique in that it cannot be a thing. The concept itself cannot differentiate from other things because it does not have a solid definition that more or less says "I am not that thing; I am something closer to the that thing but still I am not that thing..." It isn't active in the sense that it doesn't "bear the trace of other things" because it may describe anything as distinct from anything else. Differance cannot be a thing so it must be an "assemblage" of uses. The concept of "differance" is not systematic, patterned, or chronological; it is an entire network of ideas that connect at certain junctures and can just as easily be broken and reconnected elsewhere in the system without causing a rupture in that system's design.

Differance does not exist because you cannot pick it up, you may only realize is through a process of taking in a lot of conditional information and arranging that information in ways which make sense. Differance does not have an essence because it lacks that same physical mark; the only evidence of its, for lack of a better word, occurrence is the fact that it cognitively takes place in everyone or there would be no language or sensory comprehension of the world. He glosses over the world part because he knows it would be a pretty ambitious endeavour and that's why he sticks to language since it is, in fact, a system of signs. Signs are placeholders that stand-in for the "real things" that they represent (in language and elsewhere) and this is where Derrida sort of gets the idea of difference as a spatial/temporal deferment. Since signs are substitutes for things that are not present but can be expected to exist at some point somewhere they are deferments of their own realities. This takes away, or at least complicates, the idea of presence or absence because the sign could technically be considered its own thing separate from the thing it represents and it could be considered "present" but the thing it represents is necessarily "absent." What would you call this strange trick of light? You can only understand them as differences (they are different from one another and produce different effects, having different reasons to exist apart but in relation to each other). This difference can only be described as effects produced (the production of which not emitted from a subject since difference can have no materiality).

What I think would be interesting is if this wasn't based upon differences but was, instead, based upon an interconnected system of similarities. Maybe I just don't understand them thoroughly, but I think differences can only be comprehended in the fact that they share similarities with things. Like, if someone asks me what a tangerine is I wouldn't say "well a tangerine is not an apple, it is not a banana, it is not a watermelon, it is not 'different fruit variant x infinity'." I would say "it is like an orange but smaller and does not contain seeds." There, the difference is explained in terms of similarities. I argue that all differences are explained in terms of similarities. I guess Derrida sort of confronts that by arguing that there is no fundamental ground zero of terms that we can relate to each other, but I feel like the complex system he would have us base our differences upon could be equally as easy to base our similarities upon. Maybe I wouldn't be able to explain a tangerine with an orange if the person had never eaten an orange before either. There is no standard, across the board, of what fruit every single person should encounter in their lives. But I feel that the "it is like that" part can be just as important as the later, added information of "but it is not that." To expand it a little more it's like... it's true that I would be comparing tangerines to oranges as a first choice because they taste similar and there is no standard for similarities so someone else could easily say it is like a lemon because it's the same size or weight or it's like any common food because it's edible etc. BUT I could just as easily make all the same comments about differences which Derrida does. So I don't understand why differences get a more special place than similarities.