Differance, Space, and Time

So the question posed in class was "how can differance be neither a term nor a concept"? My answer to this is that differance is something of a void, or a space between two things. However, void implied emptiness, which makes it an inadequate word because this space is full of ideas and concepts and thoughts.

I think differance is not a term or a concept because it is an absence. I understand it, though, as an absences full of various presences. Derrida says that "signs represent the present in its absence; they take the place of the present", and "when the present does not present itself, then we signify" (284). He explains "differance can no longer be understood according to the concept of 'sign,' which has always been taken to mean the representation of a presence and has been constituted in a system (of thought or language) determined on the basis of and in view of presence" (284-5). If differance is not a sign because signs connote presence, then differance must connote absence.

I feel like Rivkin and Ryan refer best to how I see differance and presence when they say "what is present to the mind in conscious experience is a kind of ghost effect, a flickering of passing moments that are differentially constituted by their relations and their interconnectedness" (258). The presence of anything is spatially and temporally situated, whereas differance is the vortex of interconnectedness between those isolated spatial and temporal instances.

Rivkin and Ryan say "all things bear the 'trace' of something to which they refer in an ongoing network of relays and references" (259), which I interpret as a sort of continuum of existence.
Basically, I see differance as the place where things relate to each other in the crush or contraction of time and space. I myself am a sucker for curved spacetime, and I love identifying instances of it. That's what I see here. Differance is the black hole full of the mass of connectedness and interrelations. While we may see different presences as isolated from each other by the progression of linear spacetime, those presences are understood through the warping of spacetime, through which everything, all spaces and times and presences, are connected. And I think in this case the warping of spacetime and the eternal presence of interconnectedness is represented by differance. It is not a term or a concept, it is just a being.