Differance is not a word, not a concept (although it is the possibility of conceptuality), not an operation, does not exist, is not present (not present in itself but may be present because of what is surrounding it), and it's not an essence. What is this riddle?
Reading Derrida was so frustrating to me. I think it was because I was trying to figure out what differance is, but all he said was what it is not. It took me a while to get this. I feel like I've been focusing on picking apart different aspects of writing, and differenace reminded me that it all works together, and there is a bigger picture.
Differance is a bigger idea than can even really be imagined. It incapsulates so many variables, because in order to realize differance you have to realize that one thing can't exist without another or that one thing exists because of another thing. Differance really has no meaning on its own. It is defined by its surroundings and the existance of other things.
I think this is similar to the way Bakhtin looks at a novel. All the different parts of a novel work together to create meaning. Context is as important as the words chosen. The intention of the author is as important as the interpretation of the reader. And, there is movement in all of it, as there is movement of time and space and activity and passivity with Derrida.
Through all of this it seems that differance is how we may find a unity in literature and communication.
1 comment:
I think it's significant that, as you said, Derrida defines differance based on what it is not. This is because if I'm not mistaken, Derrida argues that language is set up as a series of binaries. His quote from Saussure on page 285 demonstrates this. Saussure writes that "the conceptual side of value is made up solely of relations and differences with respect to the other terms of language" and that "in language there are only differences". So one could say we understand everything on a basis of what it is not, and in this way Derrida is only making it easier for us to understand what differance is.
Bahktin, in discussing the baggage which language carries with it, says that "for the novelist working in prose, the object is always entangled in someone else's discourse about it" (330). This is fairly similar to Derrida's notion of understanding through differance, which has "the structure of an interlacing, a weaving, or a web" (280). Derrida's connection with theorists such as Helene Cixous implies his familiarity with the notion of the social coding of language with bias towards the privileged, which is a concept Bahktin also mentions, discussing how language is "at its core... frequently socially homogenous, as the oral and written language of a dominant social group" and says that in it "there is nevertheless always present... a certain degree of social differentiation, a social stratification, that in other eras can become extremely acute" (290).
I guess if language were only the signs themselves, this would not be the case. But since Derrida and Bahktin believe language is a series of differences then it must naturally have embedded social context sometimes based on our "imperfect" understanding of words (to return to Locke) but often in the format of language itself. I think it is very relevant to connect Bakhtin and Derrida.
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