Derrida's Differance, or How I Learned to Stop Making Sense and Just Love the Empty Concept

Derrida's differance, in my opinion, is not like a rug that really ties the room together.  Differance is, once again in my opinion, like the contestants on American Idol, who were never going to make it, but were put on television for our entertainment.  To be clear, I did not like differance, I do not agree with Derrida's idea(?) of differance, and I might not have completely understood differance.  There are some redeeming aspects of differance, but these could be easily extracted from other authors.

Let's begin with Derrida's definition of differance.  "Differance is neither a word or a concept.  In it however, we shall see the juncture rather than the summation - of what has been most decisively inscribed in the thought of what is conveniently called our "epoch": the difference of forces in Nietzche, Saussure's principle of semiological difference, differing as the possiblility of facilitation, impression and delayed effect in Freud, difference as the irreducibility of the trace of the other in Levinas, and the ontic-entological difference in Heidegger" (Derrida 279-280).  Derrida is right, differance is not a concept.  Instead, differance is the mental construction of Derrida composed of a lot of concepts, which in turn are composed of more concepts.  Derrida's differance is a massive pile of concapts, which are concepts composed of concepts.  What I'm getting at, is that if differance is not a concept or a word, then it does not make any sense because what Derrida tries to explain as differance is a concept and a word, albeit a specifically invented one.

However, this is not where I have the most differences with Derrida and his differances.  The differance, as I understood it, is an empty concept.  Although it contains many concepts itself, it relies on too many arguable points.  This applies to a universal scale regarding the essence or substance of the word.  The understanding could be different according to the context, in which it is viewed, although the fundamentals would still apply.  The first problem is the assumption of time.  Time is a human construction, there is no way to retrieve the past or advance to the future.  Although, if you could travel close to the speed of light relative to everyone else, you could essentially travel to a relative future.  That is besides the point though.  The fact is, we make up time because it suits our needs.  The second problem, is his idea of spacing, or as I read it relations and interactions over time.  If we forget about time, we still have issue with Derrida's idea of spacing.  "By this merely strategic justification, I want to emphasize that the efficacy of this thematics of differance very well may, and even one day must, bue sublated, i.e., lend itself, if not to its own replacement, at least to its involvement in a series of events which in fact it never commanded" (Derrida 283).  What does Derrida mean by never commanded?  If it was involved, it certainly played a role in the fruition of such a series of events.  Derrida speaks of connections between differences as relationships.  "Inapparent relationships" are the ones which Derrida is referring to when he calls into question spacing of the supposedly indirect series of events.  However, these relationships may be "inapparent" to us, they are certainly not on a universal scale, as most current evidence suggests.  Everything is connected, as long as the forces of the universe have had enough "time" to reach from mass to mass.  Effectively, there is an ever expanding radius of influences growing at the speed of light in 360 degrees.  The influences weaken with distance, but they are still influences.  Furthermore, everything is connected by these forces, and if you read my earlier blog post, you would see my position on everything being composed of varying states of energy.  This debunks what I think is differance's third point, in that it exists outside of thought or ideas, or that ideas and thoughts exist outside of thinking.  I'm not entirely sure on this one.  However, I would argue that thought, as we perceive it, does not exist outside of sentient systems such as our nervous systems.  The problem with existing or not existing is that it is too black and white.  Philosophers have been puzzling over such dualities as true and false, is and isn't, for ages.  It is too simple to say something is or isn't.  In this sense, our brains, acting a sentient systems, behave like perceptive probability calculators.  We accept as a reality, what our brains tell us is real.  This is our perception, and if the brain receives a great deal of stimuli, which provide evidence to support a high likelihood of something's existence, we believe it.  We see the world of varying states of energy, through a small window of foggy probabilities, and thats the best we can do for now.  But from what I do see, Derrida's differance doesn't make a whole lot of sense on any scale.