What I Got From Derrida on Differance

What is a word? How can a simple mistake, incorrect spelling, or a change of one letter in a word displace the meaning of this word? As I was reading this article "Differance" by Jacques Derrida I was utterly confused and was not able to attain anything had written; my mind was tangled up in the jargon of the difference rather than the differance. It was not until I found that he was speaking on two different words in his text, difference and differance, that I believed or hoped believed that I understood the complex issue he was stating, and that is the idea that words of similarity can obtain different meanings and produce similar meanings at the same time.  

Let us say I am giving a speech, a speech on making a difference in the world, and instead of pronouncing the word difference I say differance. In speaking this, some may assume that I am making a grammatical error or, "the a of differance... is not heard; it remains silent, and discreet, like a tomb" (Derrida, 280), this could be a problem. Looking back at John Locke's "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" he states, "the chief end of language in communication being understood, words serve not well for this" (Locke, 817), meaning it could be said that by me saying the word differance rather than difference I am trying to portray another meaning in my speech. What if the idea I am trying to state has nothing to do with difference, but to me is a completely different idea. This would end with the chaos of language.

Luckily we have culturally sound systems of speech that we can follow, and only a mad person would use the word differance to mean something completely different from difference, "the graphic difference between the e and a can function only within the system of phonetic writing and within a language or grammar historically tied to phonetic writing and to the whole culture which is inseparable from it" (Derrida, 281). Without the structure of this phonetic writing language would be lost to those we are communicating with.

A great example of this mistake is in a speech by John F. Kennedy at the Berlin Wall. Because of his heavy American accent  instead of saying "I am a citizen of Berlin", he states, "Ich bin ein Berliner" or "I am a jelly donut". Without the understanding of people in Berlin to JFKs lack of knowledge of the German language many people would be confused by this statement. What if there was no structure to language and people thought what he was saying was supposed to be a new meaning for the people of Berlin or what if JFK did use "Ich bin ein Berliner" to mean something completely different, in fact another idea of the people in Berlin. The meaning of the word may mean something different to the speaker as it does to the hearer. 

However, the words JFK spoke were of a significant language and even the mispronounced it had a similar idea of what needed to be said. However, so does differance and there is the fact that "differance  is neither a word nor a concept" (Derrida, 279). Differance is neither a sign, it lacks meaning, and it has no classifications. The word can be traced to be a misspelling by the culture or to the present people, but in the future, the word can have a completely new meaning and actually exist. What then happens to text that was written ages ago can we actually obtain their actual meanings or are they lost to generations? We are left with Derrida's final question to us, "what differs? Who differs? What is Differance?" (Derrida, 288).

Locke, John. “From An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” The Rhetorical Tradition:    Readings from Classical Times to the Present, Second Edition. Ed. Patricia Bizzel and Bruce Herzberg. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001. 814- 827.

Derrida, Jacques. "Differance." Literary Theory: An Anthology, Second Edition. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Wiley/Blackwell, 2004. 278-288.  

http://www.history.com/videos/ask-history-kennedy-and-the-jelly-doughnut#ask-history-kennedy-and-the-jelly-doughnut