Who differs? What differs? What is differance?

     Derrida asks some interesting and frustrating questions at the end of this excerpt. He asks "What differs? Who differs? What is differance?"(288). He asks "what is difference?" despite having spent the previous 10 pages trying to explain precisely that. Derrida says that "differance is what makes the movement of signification possible only if each element that is that is said to be 'present'... is related to something other than itself but retains the mark of a past element and already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation to a future element" (287). Essentially differance is the active continuous deferral of the relationship between signs and what they stand for. Derrida says that "the movement of signs defers the moment of encountering the thing itself" (284). Here differance seems to mean the spacing and temporalizing between sings and what they stand for. The act of differance is apparently the act of pulling the sign further from from the essence of what it stands for.

  If I'm not totally mistaken it seems like there is a pretty good working definition of differance in there. So why does he ask what differance is? He asks what differs and who differs in the same breath so perhaps he is arguing that we can't know what differance is unless we know who or what differs. I think the answer is that culture differs. Derrida says that culture is inseparable from phonetic writing. (281). Cultures write based on the sounds of words and then those new written words continue to define culture. Culture and phonetic writing are intimately tied in this way. It makes sense with our definition of differance too. Culture is continuously informed by written language and then redefines written language through use and misuse and in this way the sign and its referent are continuously deferred from one another.

Now assuming that culture is the "who" and "what" that Derrida is looking for, what then is differance? Based on our definition of differance, "differance" is being continuously removed from the essence of what it stands for just like all signs. So having already attempted to define "differance" I'm not sure what to do with this question besides say that perhaps he is illustrating his point that signs are always deferred so it's impossible to answer the quetion "what is differance?" In fact it must be impossible figure out what any sign means thanks to differance.