Excerpt from “on difference” - Its Include LIFE AND WORKS OF JACQUES DERRIDA, DECONSTRUCTION, DIFFERENCE & DECONSTRUCTION IN TERMS

1. MATHANKUMAR.SMATHANKUMAR.S

2.  Jacques Derrida, Ph.D., was born to an Algerian Jewish
family in EI-Biar, Algeria on 15th
July, 1930. Jacques
Derrida was French Philosopher. Derrida is best known
for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as
deconstruction.
 Derrida published more than 40 books, together with
hundreds of essays and public presentations.
 In his later writings, he frequently addressed ethical and
political themes present in his work. These writings
influenced various activists and political movements.
 Derrida’s oeuvre could be viewed as an exploration of
the nature of writing in the broadest sense as difference.
To the extent that writing always includes pictographic,
ideographic, and phonetic elements, it is not identical
with itself.
LIFE AND WORKS OF JACQUESLIFE AND WORKS OF JACQUES
DERRIDADERRIDA

3.  Deconstruction is a form a philosophical and
literary analysis derived principally from Jacques
Derrids’s 1967 work Of Grammatology.
 In the 1980 it designated more loosely a range of
theoretical enterprises in diverse areas of the
humanities and social sciences, including philosophy
and literature, law, anthropology, historiography,
linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis, political
theory, feminism, gay and lesbian studies.
 Deconstruction is generally presented via an
analysis of specific texts.
DECONSTRUCTIONDECONSTRUCTION

4.  Deconstruction has at least two aspects: literary
and philosophical.
Literary aspectLiterary aspect
The literary aspect concerns the textual interpretation,
where invention is essential to finding hidden
alternative meanings in the text.
Philosophical aspectPhilosophical aspect
The philosophical aspect concerns the main target of
deconstruction: the “metaphysics of presence,” or
simply metaphysics.
 Deconstruction contends that in any text, there are
inevitably points of equivocation and ‘undecidability’
that betray any stable meaning that an author might
seek to impose upon his or her text.
ASPECTS OF DECONSTRUCTIONASPECTS OF DECONSTRUCTION

5.  Jacques Derrida begins the essay “Difference”
(perhaps the most systematic articulation of the non-
concept that, according to Derrida, he “ha[s] been
able to utilize” in previous works) by talking about the
letter a and trying to explain (though not justify;
instead perform an “insistent intensification of its
play”) the neologism that he developed.
 In the first few paragraphs of the essay, he talks about
writing and how he neologism (“neographism” he calls
it) is “a lapse in the discipline and law” of the system,
a sort of disruption in writing and, if I may add, in
language and the order of signs in general.
DIFFEREN
CE

6.  In the philosophy of language, this has taken the
form of the privileging of speech over writing.
 In Plato (as in the Phaedrus, read by Derrida in
“Plato’s Pharmacy,” explained by Christopher
Norris in Derrida), for example, writing is
considered a “mere inscription” consisting of “alien,
arbitrary, lifeless signs”.
 These written signs, according to Plato, serve as
“mere substitutes” for speech, which, in contrast
(i.e. unlike writing), expresses immediately, without
contamination, and actively (lively happening in the
moment) the truth.

7. i.e:- Sign – Animal
Signifier – Cat
Signified –
Derrida is trying to challenge by using the word
difference. As a preliminary formulation, we can
say that the choice of difference – with an a instead
of a e – is a performance by Derrida (a stunt, even)
to reinforce the point he is trying to make.
 In French, the nasal sounds en and an explains
comically on page 4 of his essay,) one cannot tell
whether one is saying difference (with an e) of
difference (with an a).

8.  In other words, differe/ance is one of those
instances in which the order where speech
expresses or manifests instantly and immediately –
without delay, without confusion, without
detachment (no remove) – self-present meaning
or truth (as discerned by reason) is disrupted.
 Derrida observes, “a written text always and
already keeps watch over my discourse [including
spoken discourse”. “We will be able neither to
do without the passage through a written text [i.e.
we need to pass through writing], nor to avoid the
order of the disorder produced within it” (4).

9.  Thus, the distinction between the two terms of
the binary opposition-speech and writing-is
blurred (indistinct, unclear).
 More importantly, the hierarchy between them
is (at least for now) overturned, as writing turns
out to be the unexplored yet key term in the
opposition.
DECONSTRUCTION IN TERMSDECONSTRUCTION IN TERMS

10.  To illustrate this “natural” working, as it were, of
difference, Derrida looks closely at language.
 Traditionally, language (especially the Western
languages) has been thought to be a phonetic system
(i.e. a linguistic system premised on the Derrida
claims that “there is no phonetic writing”.

11.  Derrida is trying to do (by the use of
difference) is subvert the order of hierarchical
binary oppositions set up by the tradition.
 This is not to say that he aims merely to invert
the hierarchy, i.e. to put writing over speech,
undermining the primacy of truth, reasons, and
all those other concepts assigned a privileged
position.

12.  Thus, immediately following Derrida’s undermining
of speech, spoken language, and phonetic writing (i.e.
after the overturning of the hierarchy spoken of
above), is the objection that “graphic difference itself
[as discerned in the written text] vanishes into the
night [literally, since without light, it cannot be seen],
can never be sensed as a full term’.
 In other words, “the difference marked in the
‘differ( )nce’ between the e and the a eludes both
vision and hearing’.

13.  Thus, what Derrida asserts is not a difference that
writing somehow has privileged access to but rather
“a difference with which belongs neither to the
voice nor to writing in the usual sense, but between
speech and writing, and beyond the tranquil
familiarity which links us to one and the other,
occasionally reassuring us in our illusion that they
are two”.