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The Différance of the World: Homage to Jacques Derrida 
Arkady Plotnitsky 
Purdue University
aplotnit@sla.purdue.edu 

(c) 2004 Arkady Plotnitsky.
All rights reserved. 

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1. With the death of Jacques Derrida, the world has lost one of its
greatest philosophers, as well as one of the most controversial and
misunderstood. But then, controversy and misunderstanding are part and
parcel of philosophical greatness. Plato is still controversial and
misunderstood, and is still our contemporary. So are René Descartes,
Immanuel Kant, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, to name, by way of an
Einsteinian metaphor, arguably the heaviest philosophical masses that
define and shape, curve, the space of modern philosophy. Derrida is no
exception, especially because his work in turn transforms the fabric of
this space by its own mass and by its engagement with these figures.
Modern physics no longer thinks of space as ever empty but instead as a
kind of fabric or, to use the Latin word, textum of energy, or (once we
think of the quantum fabric of this never empty space) that of energy and
chance. So one might as well use this rather Derridean idea--of a textum
of energy and chance--as a metaphor for the field of philosophy. The
fortunes of Derrida's philosophy, or "his chances," lie partly in the
controversy surrounding his work ("My Chances" 1). 

2. Derrida's greatness, like that of Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel,
lies in the originality and power of his ideas, his lucidity and
precision in expressing them, and in the rigor of his analysis--qualities
his detractors often unjustly deny him. These are the qualities that
primarily define his chances, in the play "of chance and necessity in
calculations without end," as Derrida said in 1967 in assessing the
chances of différance, his most famous term, "neither a word nor a
concept," with which he was taking considerable philosophical risks at
the time (Margins of Philosophy 7; emphasis added). Derrida has been
appreciated for these qualities by a great many of his readers, his
admirers and his fair-minded critics alike. It would only be faithful to
the spirit and the letter of Derrida's work and deconstruction to
question, incessantly question his argument. But to be faithful to the
spirit of true intellectual inquiry, one must do so in a fair-minded way
in order, with and against Derrida, to move our thought forward. 

3. Derrida's works are complex because they explore the ultimate
complexity (intellectual, ethical, cultural, and political) of our world.
One might even argue that a refusal to engage seriously with his thought
and writing is often a refusal to confront this ultimate complexity,
perhaps in particular insofar as this complexity is also that of the
world that has moved from modernity to postmodernity and is defined by
this transition. I would argue that, although extraordinary in many other
respects, Derrida's thought reflects, and reflects on, this movement
wherever it occurs in our culture. "What has seemed necessary and urgent
to me, in the historical situation which is our own," Derrida said in
1971, in describing his earlier work, "is a general determination of the
conditions for the emergence and the limits of philosophy, of
metaphysics, of everything that carries it on and that it carries on"
(Positions 51; emphasis added). Derrida's concerns and domains of
investigation change and extend to literature, ethics, politics, and
elsewhere, although Derrida continued the philosophical project just
described as well, a project that already involves many of these concerns
and domains. The sense of what is "necessary and urgent . . . in the
historical situation which is our own" was, however, to define the nature
of all of his work for decades to come, decades we now see as the era of
postmodernity. 

4. I am aware that it is difficult to assign an origin to or to demarcate
either modernity or postmodernity, or their passing into each other, and
indeed it is impossible to do so unconditionally, once and for all. I am
also aware that Derrida expressly dissociated himself from some
postmodernisms, even though he commented on the postmodern world itself
on many occasions, for example, in The Other Heading: Reflections on
Today's Europe and in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work
of Mourning and the New International. Many of his proponents and some
self-appointed defenders went quite far in trying to dissociate Derrida
from all (all!) postmodernism and, and more generally, to bring Derrida
back into the fold of traditionalist thinking. I would argue, however,
that while, as does most other revolutionary work, Derrida's work
respects and upholds many traditions and what is best in them, this work
itself is essentially revolutionary and not traditionalist. As such, his
work, say, from the 1960s on, also marks and is marked by the culture of
postmodernity, or the postmodernity of culture, and may, accordingly, be
seen as postmodernist, although, of course, not contained by this rubric.
(I use "postmodernity" to denote the culture of roughly this period, and
"postmodernist" to denote certain modes of thought, such as Derrida's,
that are both the products of this culture and, often, reflections on
it.) Indeed, many of his critics associate his thinking with
postmodernism and its "dangers." By contrast, I argue not only that
Derrida's thought is postmodernist but also, and even primarily, that
both the culture of postmodernity and, at its best, postmodernist thought
are Derridean, in part by virtue of being shaped by Derrida's work. 


Deconstruction and Writing 

5. Derrida is most famous as the (one can safely say "the") founder of
deconstruction, a term that has by now been disseminated well beyond the
ways it is used by Derrida or by his fellow-thinkers and followers. This
is an achievement in itself on Derrida's part, even apart from the fact
that this dissemination is best understood in terms of Derrida's own
conception of dissemination or différance-dissemination, which I explain
later. Would one, were it not for Derrida, find "deconstruction" already
in spell-check word-processing programs or in half a million Google
listings? Would one have heard Henry Kissinger speak of a
"deconstructive" approach to understanding controversial political
situations as "taking a clock apart to see how it is ticking," or
Zbigniew Brzezinski speak of "deconstructing" our received ideas
regarding Europe? 

6. These uses of the term are not so much misunderstandings as
simplifications, although it would be difficult to imagine that either
Kissinger or Brzezinski has read Derrida's The Other Heading or Specters
of Marx, where such political situations are given their due
deconstructive complexities. To use Kissinger's metaphor, Derrida's work
deals with clocks that have special secrets, and sometimes clocks within
clocks. The metaphor is also peculiarly apt given that temporality is
always at stake in Derrida's deconstruction, from his earliest work on
Edmund Husserl on. Like Einstein's argument in relativity theory (a
deconstruction of Newtonism?), Derrida's deconstruction tells us that
time itself (or space, or their relationship) does not exist, physically
or phenomenally, independently of observation and of our instruments of
observation, so as to be then represented by means of these instruments,
such as clocks and rulers, or even by our theories. Instead, time and
space, in any way we can observe or conceive of them, are effects of
instruments--technologies--of observation and, again, of our theories,
and even represent or embody our experimental and theoretical practices.
This process may be best understood in terms of what Derrida calls
writing, in part by extending, via Martin Heidegger, the idea of
technology, tekhne. For the moment, Derrida also sees these
deconstructive and, as such, again technological in the broad sense,
written, processes of taking those clocks apart, and of putting them
together, as themselves requiring deconstruction. In principle such
deconstructive work never ends, as it builds new technologies, new forms
of writing. But neither does, in principle, almost any real theoretical
work or its production of new forms of writing. Will we ever be finished
with understanding nature in physics, life in biology, mind in
philosophy, literature in criticism, or with understanding how we
understand them? Not altogether inconceivable, but not very likely! 

7. That is not to say that deconstruction does not achieve positive
results or make new discoveries. For Derrida, deconstruction is both a
critical and a positive or, as he liked to call it, an affirmative
practice. It does have what Friedrich Nietzsche, arguably the greatest
precursor of deconstruction, saw as a tragic sense of life, or, as
Derrida calls it, life-death, "living on," and "living on border lines,"
the border lines of life and death. The complexity of Derrida's
deconstruction reflects, and reflects on, the complexity of the
life-death processes of our bodies, minds, and cultures, and their
technologies of writing. 

8. The concept of writing is one of Derrida's most original
contributions, arising from his understanding of the role of language in
these processes, but, as must be clear already, it expands well beyond
these limits. Indeed this expansion is necessary, given Derrida's
analysis of the workings of language as writing, which requires that we
reconceive the nature of language itself and of the relationships among
thought, language, and culture, but also enables us to do so. (I
italicize writing when I use it in Derrida's sense.) One should more
rigorously speak of "neither a word nor a concept" here, but I shall
(Derrida sometimes does as well) use the phrase "the concept of writing"
for the sake of convenience, presupposing this qualification, which I
shall further explain, via différance, later. It would be difficult to do
Derrida's analysis of writing justice here (it took Derrida himself
hundreds of pages to develop his analysis), and almost nothing in Derrida
can be "summarized without being mistreated," as he once said about Hegel
(Writing and Difference 254). It may however be worth commenting on
Derrida's writing in more detail here, both as one of the earliest and
still most graphic examples of deconstruction, and as a crucial concept
in its own right. For at stake here is not only a deconstruction, let
alone merely the overturning of previous regimes and hierarchies, such as
speech above writing, in their conventional sense. As Derrida writes, "it
is not a question of resorting to the same concept of writing and of
simply inverting the dissymmetry that now has become problematical. It is
a question, rather, of producing a new concept of writing," of "the
irruptive emergence of a new 'concept,' a concept that can no longer be,
and never could be, included in the previous regime" (Positions 26, 42).
This type of deconstructive machinery and the workings of writing never
left Derrida's work. It is not that his subsequent work could be
translated into this early project: he moved on to new and sometimes
quite different work. There are, however, often implicit but essential
workings of both deconstruction (in this initial sense) and writing
throughout his work. 

9. Derrida's concept of writing emerges through a deconstruction of the
conventional and, as Derrida shows, unrigorous concept of writing. The
latter defines writing as a representation of speech, while speech itself
is, concomitantly, seen in (and as ensuring) the greatest possible
proximity to thought, a form of what Derrida famously called the
"metaphysics of presence," and a manifestation of its avatars, such as
logocentrism, phonocentrism, or phallogocentrism. A certain "science"
(operative in a deconstructed field, as opposed to strictly positive or
positivistic science) of writing was proposed by Derrida under the name
of "grammatology" in Of Grammatology. Eventually or even immediately, the
practice became disseminated (again, in Derrida's sense) in more
heterogeneous fields. This new "science" of writing was juxtaposed to
Saussurean linguistics, specifically as the science of speech conceived
in metaphysical opposition to and privileged over writing. By the same
token, writing is also seen as auxiliary and, in principle (even if not
in practice), dispensable, a claim that Derrida's deconstruction shows to
be impossible to sustain rigorously. Derrida shows more generally that
this opposition and hierarchy (of thought placed over speech, and speech
over writing) characterizes most philosophy, from Plato to Hegel and
beyond, as the metaphysics of presence. Accordingly, even though
ostensibly designed in opposition to philosophy, and specifically to
phenomenology, linguistics is shown to be complicit with philosophy as
the metaphysics of presence. This deconstruction extends to other human
or social sciences, such as anthropology (specifically that of Claude
Lévi-Strauss), which are often, especially as part of the structuralist
paradigm, modeled on linguistics. If, however, this conventional,
philosophical concept of writing is shown to be uncritical, the same--and
this is crucial--is also true of the conventional concept of speech or of
thought. Derrida's analysis of writing reconceptualizes all three as part
of the same deconstructive-constructive process, strategically borrowing
the name "writing," "the old name," from the subordinate member of the
metaphysical opposition of speech and writing for his new concept
(Margins 329). 

10. The argument just described offers a paradigmatic example of
deconstruction. Its technique or tekhne applies to "all the pairs of
opposites on which philosophy is constructed and on which our discourse
lives" (Margins 17). Derrida's deconstruction does not dispense with or
merely reverse such opposites (they are usually hierarchical), but
explains their necessity in their specificity within a given field, and
resituates and re-delimits them in a new deconstructed conceptual field
it creates (Margins 17). One must produce new concepts "that can no
longer be, and never could be, included in the previous regime," possibly
by using a reversal as a phase of such an analysis and by, strategically,
borrowing a name, such as that of writing, from a subordinate member of a
given hierarchy. In other words, a given (old) configuration continues to
function, both in re-delimited old regimes and in new regimes, rather
than being simply abandoned, although some portions of it must be given
up. 

11. In what I find to be his best single description, Derrida specifies
the "nuclear traits of all writing," writing that is at work "always and
everywhere throughout language," to borrow from Derrida on Heidegger
(Margins 27): 


the break with the horizon of communication as the communication of
consciousnesses and presences, and as the linguistic or semantic
transport of meaning; (2) the subtraction of all writing from the
semantic horizon or the hermeneutic horizon which, at least as a horizon
of meaning, lets itself be punctured by writing; (3) the necessity of, in
a way, separating the concept of polysemia [as a controlled or
controllable plurality of meaning] from the concept I have elsewhere
named dissemination [an uncontrollable plurality of meaning], which is
also the concept of writing; (4) the disqualification or the limit of the
concept of the "real" or "linguistic" context, whose theoretical
determination or empirical saturation are, strictly speaking, rendered
impossible or insufficient by writing. (Margins 316; emphasis on
"writing" added)


To the extent that one could use a single definition here, one might say
that writing in Derrida's sense disrupts and prevents the ultimate (but
only ultimate) possibility of controlling the play of difference and
multiplicity in any meaning production or communication. As this passage
indicates, in the process of the deconstruction of conventional or narrow
writing and the production of a new, Derridean, concept of writing, a
network of new concepts is produced, a network that, by definition,
cannot be closed: différance, dissemination, trace, supplement, etc.
Indeed, this production and this interminable generation, "eruptive
emergence," of new concepts is necessary and unavoidable. 

12. The conceptual field thus emerging acquires tremendous theoretical
potential and allows one to attach the reconfigurative operator (of
Derrida's) writing to other conventional denominations and to transform
them accordingly. There could be writing-thinking, writing-speech,
writing-writing, writing-philosophy, writing-literature,
writing-criticism, writing-reading, writing-painting, and even
writing-dancing, as in Stéphane Mallarmé's Mimique, where indeed,
according to Derrida, all these forms of writing interact (Dissemination
223). Writing-mathematics and writing-science become possible as well,
and Derrida's analysis relates the question of writing to the question of
mathematical formalism via Descartes and Leibniz in a remarkable section
of Of Grammatology, "Algebra: Arcanum and Transparence" (75-81). Derrida
shows that there is writing in Derrida's sense in mathematical algebra,
and, reciprocally, a certain "algebra" in writing in the conventional
sense: that algebra becomes part of the practice of writing in Derrida's
sense and is actively deployed by it. 

13. Deconstruction, then, is a work of rethinking a given concept or
phenomenon, such as writing (in its conventional sense), which may appear
familiar and simple, but is in fact constituted through complex
intellectual, linguistic, psychological, or cultural processes. It is a
discovery and exploration of the deeper layers of such processes, and a
creation of new concepts, such as writing (in Derrida's sense), which
enables such discoveries and explorations. 

14. Beyond their analytical value, these discoveries, explorations, and
creations of concepts have broad ethical, cultural, and political
implications. Derrida examines these implications throughout his work,
and his philosophical thought is inseparable from his remarkable
contributions to many crucial cultural and political debates of our time.
His ethical and political subjects--such as democracy, hospitality,
friendship, responsibility, forgiveness, and capital punishment--and
encounters--especially with Marx, Benjamin, and Levinas--powerfully
manifest this inseparability in his philosophical work of the last
decade. It would be difficult to overestimate Derrida's significance for
feminist and gender theory, where Derrida has such distinguished
followers as Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Judith Butler;
postcolonial theory, where the work of such Derrideans as Gayatri Spivak
played a major role; and Marxist and post-Marxist thought, where his
ideas influence such authors as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and
Fredric Jameson, among others. On a more practical-political side (if one
can separate sides here), Derrida made decisive interventions on such
issues as apartheid in South Africa, on the Middle East, the new
(post-Soviet) Europe, and the Iraq War (both Iraq Wars). His role on the
French intellectual and political scene was of course essential, as
Jacques Chirac (hardly a deconstructionist) admiringly acknowledged in
his announcement of Derrida's death as the death of a thinker who,
"through his work . . . sought to find the free movement which lies in
the root of all thinking." Derrida's work has shaped our world for a long
time and it will continue to do so for a long time to come. I also argue
that it has done and will continue to do so not in small part because it
reflected on and shaped this world as the world of postmodernity, as
these specifically cultural and political contributions would indicate as
well. But then, again, they remain inseparable from Derrida's
philosophical thought and writing. 


Absolute Knowledge and Unnamable Différance

15. There are, to use his term, many "junctures" of Derrida's work to
support an argument that Derrida is a thinker of the culture of
postmodernity and (the inversion is appropriate) of the postmodernity of
our culture--the différance of the postmodern--beginning with the
juncture of "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences" (Writing and Difference). That essay arguably initiated (and
still defines) poststructuralist and, via poststructuralism,
postmodernist thought, and many of the debates and controversies that
surround them. Ironically, the essay was initially given in English in
1966 at a conference at Johns Hopkins University and published in The
Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of
Man (eds. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, Johns Hopkins UP, 1969). It
is ironic because with this essay Derrida almost single-handedly ended
the controversy, or not so much the controversy as structuralism itself,
and moved the Western-philosophical landscape on to poststructuralism and
postmodernism. The essay has remained uncircumventable ever since, to use
Derrida's word [incontournable], applied by him to "Heidegger's
meditation" but, by now, no less applicable to his own thought (Margins
22). 

16. One might, correlatively, consider "the juncture--rather than the
summation" of différance, the juncture, Derrida also says, "of what has
been most decisively inscribed in the thought of what is conveniently
called our 'epoch'" ("Differance," Speech and Phenomena 130, a statement
which does not appear in the text published in Margins of Philosophy).
This "epoch" is also the postmodern "epoch" (using this term as a
convenient abbreviation, as Derrida does by way of allusion to Husserl's
phenomenological reduction) and the postmodernist type of inscription: a
juncture rather than a summation. Différance itself may be the most
postmodernist of Derrida's concepts, especially if coupled with
dissemination, as it must be. Derrida most immediately mentions Friedrich
Nietzsche, Ferdinand de Saussure, Sigmund Freud, Emmanuel Levinas, and
Martin Heidegger, but Hegel, Husserl, Georges Bataille, and, more
implicitly Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze are part of this juncture as
well. These, along with Derrida himself, are all figures, or, as Derrida
would say, names of problems that define the movement of our thought from
modernism to postmodernism and beyond (Of Grammatology 99). 

17. It may well be, however, that what reflects this movement more than
anything in Derrida's writing and, with Derrida, in general is a
transformation of Hegelian Absolute Knowledge, the philosophical idea
that is a paradigm of modernity and/as the Enlightenment, into the
irreducibly decentered and disseminating multiplicity, différance, of the
postmodern. This différance replaces the claim for Absolute Knowledge,
its very possibility, with a different economy, a marketplace or, as
Derrida says, an auction of knowledge and claims upon it (Post Card 521). 

18. "Decentering" is one of Derrida's earliest terms, made famous and
controversial by "Structure, Sign, and Play." It is worth noting at the
outset that Derridean decentering is not defined by the absence of all
centrality (a common misconception). Instead it is defined by
multicentering, a potential emergence of many centers and claims upon one
or another centrality in the absence of a single, absolute center that
would define its alternatives as unconditionally marginal. To cite the
uncircumventable "Structure, Sign, and Play": 

Turned toward the lost or impossible presence of the absent origin, this
structuralist thematic of broken immediacy is therefore the saddened,
negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic side of the thinking of play
whose other side would be the Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous
affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming,
the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and
without origin which is offered to an active interpretation. This
interpretation then determines the noncenter otherwise than as loss of
the center. And it plays without security. For there is a sure play: that
which is limited to the substitution of given and existing, present,
pieces. In absolute chance, affirmation also surrenders itself to genetic
indetermination, to the seminal adventure of the trace. (Writing and
Difference 292)


19. Dissemination appears later, by way, in addition to Hegel, of Plato
(pharmakon), Stéphane Mallarmé (hymen and undecidability), Lacan,
Philippe Sollers, and several others. Dissemination is inherent in the
movement of différance, and Derrida sometimes refers to it as "seminal
différance" (Positions 45). Both are part of Derrida's ensemble of
interrelated but different neither-words-nor-concepts--différance,
dissemination, trace, supplement, writing, etc., as this list, itself
subject to the regime of différance and dissemination, has no
termination, taxonomical closure, or center that could determinately
organize it, for example, around any of its terms, such as différance.
For, under these conditions, there cannot be "the unique word, . . . the
finally proper name" (Margins 27). According to Derrida, in commenting on
the relationships between différance and Heideggerian "difference," which
is governed by Heidegger's concept of "Being," 


"older" than Being itself, such a différance has no name in our language.
But we "already know" that if it is unnameable, it is not provisionally
so, not because our language has not yet found or received this name, or
because we would have to seek it in another language, outside the finite
system of our own. It is rather because there is no name for it at all,
not even the name of essence or of Being, not even that of "différance,"
which is not a name, which is not a pure nominal unity, and unceasingly
dislocates itself in a chain of differing and deferring substitutions. 


"There is no name for it": a proposition to be read in its platitude.
This unnameable is not an ineffable Being which no name could approach:
God, for example. This unnameable is the play which makes possible
nominal effects, the relatively unitary and atomic structures that are
called names, the chains of substitutions of names in which, for example,
the nominal effect différance is itself enmeshed, carried off,
reinscribed, just as a false entry or a false exit is still part of the
game, a function of the system. (Margins 26-27)


20. By the same token, "the efficacy of the thematic of différance may
very well, indeed must, one day be superseded, lending itself if not to
its own replacement, at least to enmeshing itself in a chain that in
truth it never will have governed" (7). This is indeed what has happened,
has always already happened, even in the very moment of this inscription,
in Derrida's own work, which is, again, the work of a rigorous
proliferation, the dissemination of names. "Whereby," he adds, "once
again, it [différance] is not theological" (7; also Margins 6). This
difference from all theology, positive or negative, is crucial for
Derrida's inscription of différance and, I would argue, for all of
Derrida's thought, earlier or later, some appearances in his later works
and certain claims concerning them notwithstanding. It defines his work
as materialist, even though and because it also juxtaposes this
deconstructive materialism to all metaphysical materialism (all idealism
of matter, one might say), from Positions to Specters of Marx (Positions
64). 

21. In closing "Différance," Derrida extends and elaborates the
Nietzschean themes of "Structure, Sign, and Play": 


There will be no unique name, even if it were the name of Being. And we
must think this without nostalgia, that is, outside of the myth of a
purely maternal or paternal language, a lost native country of thought.
On the contrary, we must affirm this, in the sense in which Nietzsche
puts affirmation into play, in a certain laughter and a certain step of
the dance. 


From the vantage of this laughter and this dance, from the vantage of
this affirmation foreign to all dialectics, the other side of nostalgia,
what I will call Heideggerian hope, comes into question [a hope for
finding a single word, the unique word, in order to name the essential
nature of Being]. . . . 

Such is the question: the alliance of speech and Being in the unique
word, in the finally proper name. And such is the question inscribed in
the simulated affirmation of différance. It bears (on) each member of
this sentence: "Being / speaks / always and everywhere / throughout /
language." (Margins 27)


Between Heidegger and Derrida, or Hegel (dialectic) and Derrida, and with
Nietzsche and Derrida, Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable may come close to
this "simulated affirmation of différance." It may be one of Derrida's
literary models, although he never expressly considers it (Acts of
Literature 61-62). 

22. These Derridean themes figure significantly in many discussions and
definitions of postmodernity and postmodernism, from Lyotard on. An
important conceptual and epistemological determination of the postmodern
is the concept of the uncontainable and multicentered multiplicity, which
correlates to various forms of loss of knowledge, posited against the
centered pyramid required or desired by the Enlightenment paradigm
(Hegelian Absolute Knowledge), to echo Derrida's themes of the pit and
the pyramid of Hegel in "The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to
Hegelian Semiology" and "Différance" (Margins 4, 69-108). 

23. Under these conditions of the irretrievable loss of "the unique word,
the finally proper name," différance refers to an in principle
interminable play of differences, similarities, and interrelations in any
meaning production. As part of this play, and as a modification of the
French word "différer" (to differ), différance connotes a dynamics of
difference and deferral or delay (in presentation). It is crucial,
however, that Derrida conceives of différance and of the unconceivable of
différance much more broadly: 


What is written as différance, then, will be the playing movement that
"produces"--by means of something that is not simply an activity--these
differences, these effects of difference. This does not mean that the
différance that produces differences is somehow before them, in a simple
and unmodified--in-different--present. Différance is the non-full,
non-simple, structured and differentiating origin of differences. Thus,
the name "origin" no longer suits it. . . . we will designate as
différance the movement according to which language, or any code, any
system of referral in general, is constituted "historically" as a weave
of differences. "Is constituted," "is produced," "is created,"
"movement," "historically," etc., necessarily being understood beyond the
metaphysical language in which they are retained, along with all their
implications. (Margins 11-12)


Accordingly, in working with its satellites and avatars, différance is
productive of and responsible for manifest effects, "effect[s] without
cause[s]" of difference, or identity, similarity, relationality, and so
forth, or, as we have seen, effects of différance, effects that make us
infer différance as their efficacy (Margins 12, 26-27). Différance
itself, however, remains irreducibly inaccessible--unknowable,
unrepresentable, inconceivable, unthinkable, and so forth (Margins
20-21). At the same time and by the same token, it is also never the
same, is always disseminated. That is, while each time unknowable,
unrepresentable, inconceivable, or unthinkable, it is each time different
and reciprocal with its effects. 

24. Dissemination denotes that part of this play which entails an
ultimately uncontrollable multiplicity, inherent, it follows, already in
the workings of différance as each time different, disseminating itself,
both in itself (i.e., under its own name) and into its proximates and
avatars. As such, dissemination is juxtaposed to a controllable plurality
of the Hegelian dialectical Aufhebung (Hegel's favorite term, which has
in German a triple meaning of negation, conservation, and supercession,
and is accordingly untranslatable), and is analogous to conceptions of
plurality or polysemia in philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and
elsewhere. But then it also follows that différance already displaces
Hegel in this way and that it entails dissemination, "seminal différance"
(Margins 13-14; Positions 43-45). As Derrida says, "the operator of
generality named dissemination inserted itself into the open chain of
différance, 'supplement,' 'pharmakon,' 'hymen,' etc."; it carries many
features of différance and is defined in virtually the same terms, but
with an emphasis on a multiplicity of effects or, again, multicentering
(Positions 44-45). Both différance and dissemination, and their companion
operators in the Derridean deconstructive field, enact a deconstruction
of Hegel's dialectic and of the Hegelian economy of Absolute Knowledge. 

25. Accordingly,

if there were a definition of différance, it would be precisely the
limit, the interruption, the destruction of the Hegelian relève
[Aufhebung, thus read] wherever it operates. What is at stake here is
enormous. I emphasize the Hegelian Aufhebung, such as it is interpreted
by a certain Hegelian discourse, for it goes without saying that the
double [triple] meaning of Aufhebung could be written otherwise. Whence
the proximity of différance to all the operations conducted against
Hegel's dialectical speculation. (Positions 40-41; translation modified)


The difference (and sometimes différance) between Hegel and Hegelianism
inscribed here requires a long discussion, and the stakes are indeed
enormous. Might one read Hegel's Absolute Knowledge along the lines of
différance? Perhaps. This would be Derrida's answer as well: Hegel is
"the last philosopher of the book and the first thinker of writing" (Of
Grammatology 26). For "the destruction of the Hegelian relève"
notwithstanding, and indeed in order to enact it, "différance thus
written, although maintaining relations of profound affinity with
Hegelian discourse (such as it must be read), is also, up to a certain
point, unable to break with that discourse (which has no kind of meaning
or chance); but it [différance] can operate a kind of infinitesimal and
radical displacement of it [Hegelian discourse]" (Margins 14; also
Positions 43-44). By the time of Glas, this "displacement" reaches close
to a thousand pages, and the delineation itself is never finished. The
interminability of this encounter confirms Derrida's statement in
Positions: "it is still a question of elucidating the relationship to
Hegel--a difficult labor, which for the most part remains before us, and
which in a certain way is interminable, at least if one wishes to execute
it rigorously and minutely" (43-44). 

26. The same type of "profound affinity and yet infinitesimal and radical
displacement" defines nearly all of Derrida's relationships to the major
figures he engages. It is a long list, in itself reflecting the
relationships--in turn a profound affinity and yet infinitesimal and
radical displacement--between modernity and postmodernity, and the
complexity of Derrida's work and the magnitude of his achievement. An
incomplete list includes, in roughly chronological order, Plato,
Aristotle, Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Freud,
Saussure, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Bataille, Blanchot, and Lacan. If
Nietzsche is conspicuous by his absence, it is because in this case it is
difficult to speak of displacement, as Derrida's assessment of and his
encounters with Nietzsche indicate (Of Grammatology 19; Spurs:
Nietzsche's Style [throughout]). Literature is yet another story, yet
another long list of proper names. 

27. The enormity of the Hegelian stakes appears to be ever undiminished
in Derrida. Derrida returns to Glas in closing The Post Card: From
Socrates to Freud and Beyond. He specifically addresses Freud and Lacan,
and the economy, the political economy of psychoanalysis, a life-long
engagement on Derrida's part. Exposing the philosophical significance of
psychoanalytic economy is one of Derrida's major achievements. The
implications of Derrida's point at the end of The Post Card, however, are
broader still.  He writes: 


The question then becomes--and it is not only political, although it is
also political, it is the question of general deconstruction . . . the
question then becomes: 

Who will pay whom . . .? 

Or, if you prefer, the thing already having been broached, who has it
paid to whom? 

The bidding has been opened--for some time. 

Let us say that what I write or what makes me write (for example, since
there are not only the texts, this time I mean the publications) would
represent in this respect only one offer. 

An offer on the scene in which the attempts to occupy the place of the Sa
(that is, of the Savoir absolu stenographed in Glas) are multiplying,
that is, simultaneously all the places, those of the seller, the buyer,
and the auctioneer. (Post Card 520-51)



It is worth noting, yet again, the multicentering of claims upon the
center which accompany the structural decentering of the economy of
knowledge at stake, which is also in part a political economy. We are and
have been for quite a while on this scene. Always? Perhaps, at least to
some degree, but never as much as now, in the postmodern intellectual,
cultural, or political world. Derrida's offer is (as he will say later,
teleopoetically) that of a philosophical argument concerning or an
inscription of the very condition, "the postmodern condition," under
which this offer is made. This argument is itself defined by a "profound
affinity and yet infinitesimal and radical displacement" of Hegel's
Absolute Knowledge, in part via Freud and Lacan. It is crucial, however,
that, in this view, Derrida can only make an offer, one offer among
others, traditional and radical, modern and postmodern, and so forth, and
various versions of absolute knowledge are still offered at this auction,
if there is only one auction underway here. 

28. The question is whether any such offer can still dominate this
marketplace and this auction. We recall, with Deleuze, that philosophy
itself was born in such an agora, the marketplace of democracy (the first
democracy?), at which Socrates offered, and Plato bought, his version of
absolute knowledge. It is a version against which every argument and
claim, philosophical, ethical, or political, and of course all
literature, would have to be measured. The Socrates/Plato "deal" is of
course crucially at stake in The Post Card (the post card sent from "from
Socrates to Freud and Beyond"), but Hegel, Heidegger, Freud, and Lacan
are all part of our own economy of knowledge. Derrida inscribes this
bargain--Socrates speaks, Plato writes, or vice versa--in any of the
relations between these figures, and others such as Kant, Descartes, and
Rousseau can be added to the list. This Derridean condition transforms
knowledge, in part as "the postmodern condition," along the lines of
Lyotard's argument in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge at
about the same time (1979). 

29. Joyce, Derrida tells us, has already inscribed this new space of the
claim(s) to occupy the space of absolute knowledge in "an immense
postcard" of his own, Ulysses, which Derrida is always rewriting,
including in The Post Card, all his life (Acts of Literature 260-262).
One is, however, equally tempted to use Derrida's passage as a reading of
an auction, like the one in which Oedipa Maas awaits in the final scene
of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, an icon of literary
postmodernism. Still, writing in Derrida's sense underwrites everything
here, including literature, which modern and postmodern democracy
authorizes--such is the literary contract we signed as a society,
reflected in any given actual literary contract--to say everything and
anything and collect our payments, as readers, for doing so (Acts of
Literature, 37-49; On the Name 27-31). But then, again: 


Who will pay whom . . . ? 

Or, if you prefer, the thing already having been broached, who has it 
paid to whom? 


Chaosmic Différance and Funeral Rites 

30. We have been bidding on this offer, on all these offers, for quite a
while, but the auction is far from over. "What is at stake here is
enormous," between philosophy and literature, each of which is already
split into literature and philosophy from within. The columns--Plato's
Philebus, philosophy, on the left, Mallarmé's Mimique, literature, on the
right--of the opening pages of "The Double Session" anticipate Glas:
"INTER Platonem and Mallarmatum," (in) between Plato and Mallarmé, (in)
between Hegel and Mallarmé, or indeed between Hegel and Plato
(Dissemination 181). Each, as the name of a problem, is already between
philosophy and literature, as is of course Derrida. 

31. Politics is inevitably inserted, entered into all these
"in-betweens," and many a specter of Marx hovers over the book. As an
authorization (legal, political, and ethical) to say everything and
anything, literature is fundamentally linked both to capitalism and to
democracy, and to their relations, to begin with (On the Name 27-30).
"The time is out of joint" (Derrida's theme, via Hamlet, in Specters of
Marx) already in early 1969, when Derrida delivered the original version
of "The Double Session," in the aftermath of 1968, one of the most
out-of-joint years of the second half of the century, and a defining year
of postmodernity. "The Paris spring," "the Prague August" of the Soviet
invasion (Prague, where he was arrested once, came to play a significant
role in Derrida's life), the Vietnam War, the assassination of Martin
Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, were among its events (also in the
sense of something unique, singular that Derrida gave this word later).
The opening of "The End of Man," given as a lecture in October 1968 in
New York, is a powerful instance of Derrida's response to these events
(Margins 111-14). Hegel remains central to the essay as well, which,
however, is hardly in conflict, quite the contrary, with its political
urgency, then or now. Hegel's Phenomenology, Derrida says, with Bataille,
is "the slave('s) language, that is, the worker('s) language . . . [it]
can be read from left to right or from right to left, as a reactionary
movement or as a revolutionary movement, or both at once" (Writing and
Difference 276). 

32. We can read the columns of Glas this way too, each often split in
turn into further columns--between philosophy and literature, literature
and politics, literature and revolution, between Hegel and Genet, between
Kant and Hegel, in Rembrandt's chiaroscuros (Glas 1b), between Derrida
and all these names. (Derrida returns to Rembrandt in Memoirs of the
Blind.) In general, Glas is to shape so much, perhaps (for the reasons
set forward here) nearly everything, in later Derrida, but of course it
does not define this later work altogether. On the left--or is it, at
least politically, on the right, or between left and right?--we are
between Kant and Hegel, on ethics, morality, and politics. We see both
figures through ethics, morality, and politics (in part via Levinas):
"the two sides face each other" (Glas 11a). On the right--or is it,
politically, on the left, with literature and the acts of
literature?--the column splits into two. On the left of the split, the
left of the right, one finds: 


Colossal habitat: 
the masterpiece. He bands erect in his seing, but also
occupies it like a sarcophagus. (Glas 11b)


33. "Colossal habitat" is also the Universe itself, God's masterpiece,
envisioned by Kant's analysis of the colossal, placed between, in
between, the beautiful and the sublime (thus also between understanding
and reason), a vision of the Universe as a colossal and perhaps
innumerable assembly of galaxies. It is still Galileo's and then Newton's
"book of nature written in the language of mathematics," a point not
missed in Of Grammatology (16; translation modified, emphasis added).
Derrida fittingly closes his "Parergon" with this vision, where he also
alludes to Glas and anticipates The Post Card (Truth in Painting 145-47). 

34. Now, although the point would require a long excursion into modern
mathematics, science, and cosmology, and it could only be, to use
Derrida's language, telegraphed, tele-graphed here, I would argue that
Derrida is also a philosopher of the Universe as we see it now, in the
following sense. What his philosophy reflects and philosophically
reflects on (however implicitly) is the transition from Copernicus to
Kepler's Harmonia Mundi to Galileo's book of nature to Kant's galactic
colossal, and finally to post-Einsteinian relativistic cosmology. This
cosmology still uses the language of mathematics, but it makes this
language writing. The Universe itself, the visible and the invisible in
it, looks more and more like a kind of différance, both on the largest
and on the smallest (quantum) scales, especially when one combines, as
modern physics must, nature's smallest and largest scales. Thus both
modern physics and Derrida bring us to the différance of the
Universe--the chaosmic différance, a play of energy and chance--a
différance that also makes speaking of the Universe rigorously
impossible. In other words, Derrida can also be seen as a thinker of our
material habitats (without claiming or even attempting to be one), as he
is a philosopher of our cultural habitats. It would be tempting to link
this différance of nature primarily to Kant, and the différance of
politics and culture, as described above, to Hegel. But this never-one
différance is just as much the différance in-between Kant and Hegel as it
is in-between nature and culture, from "Structure, Sign, and Play" on, to
which Derrida and we continue to return, eternally return, as Nietzsche
(the main figure of the essay) would have it. 

35. On the right of the right column of Genet at this juncture of Glas is
Genet's conception of the ultimate major ("capitale," but also
decapitated) colossal masterpiece literature authorized by a contract,
and by the contract we have signed with "the strange institution called
literature" (Acts of Literature 33): 


Glory again, with which the syllabary is initiated, in the future
perfect, in the publishing contract, signed with the institution (family
and city), that is, with the funeral rite, the burial organization.
Tearing up the contract, the literary operation reverts to no more than
confirming it undefatigably, in the margin, with a siglum. "There is a
book entitled I'll Have a Fine Funeral. We are acting with a view to a
fine funeral, to formal obsequies. They will be the masterpiece, in the
strict sense of the word, the major [capitale] work, quite rightly the
crowning glory of our life. I must die in an apotheosis, and it doesn't
matter whether I know glory before or after my death as long as I know
that I'll have it, and I shall have it if I sign a contract with a firm
of undertakers that will attend to fulfilling my destiny, to rounding it
off." At the moment of the "theatrical stunt [coup]," in Funeral Rites,
when they "slid" the coffin onto the catafalque--"the conjuring away of
the coffin"--before its reduction, as with the coffin of "Saint-Osmose"
(a fictive letter about the Golden Legend--published in Italian) into a
box of matches, "Jean's death was duplicating itself in another death."
(Glas 11b)


Genet and Derrida may have been thinking (for glas means knell, to begin
with), of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the funeral rite of literary modernism
and yet another colossal postcard, replacing the book of absolute
knowledge with writing in Derrida's sense, just as Glas and The Post
Card, perhaps all of Derrida's books are, the "book[s] that will not have
been book[s]," colossal postcards sent to Socrates and Freud and so many
other writers between and beyond them, and to all of us. 

36. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, /Than are dreamt
of in your philosophy," in heaven and earth, in spirit and matter, in
light and darkness, in space and time. "And therefore as a stranger give
it welcome," we may say with Hamlet (Hamlet, Act II. ii, 165-68). It is a
welcome to Derrida's philosophy, a philosophy, like Shakespeare's
literature, of the strangeness and complexity of life. Shakespeare
appears in Derrida rarely enough, now and then, here and there, but often
decisively, as in "My Chances," where Derrida cites these very lines on
the way to "How malicious is my fortune" from King Lear. "The sense of
remorse or misfortune . . . the regret I [Derrida] feel in not having
attempted with you, as I initially projected, an analysis of King Lear. .
. . I would have followed" ("My Chances" 29). Never enough time! It is
only a few lines below that Hamlet is to say, with the voice of the Ghost
intervening from below, that "the time is out of joint" (ii, 189). These
are of course the lines through which Derrida is to address, a few
centuries later in the epoch of capitalism, our own time in Specters of
Marx. The theme follows him politically through the end of his life, in
his writings and in his interventions into the often tragic events that
were to shape and reshape the world during the last decade. "To set it
right" ("O cursed spite/That ever I was born to set it right" [ii,
189-90]): that is yet another story in which such notions as "right" and
"setting" need to be rethought. Many specters, ghosts of Derrida will
likely be the permanent guests of this rethinking, in which we must "go
together" with our guests and ghosts alike. "Go together" are the words
that Hamlet says to his companions, friends, waiting for him to go ahead
of them, as befits courtly etiquette. With these words Shakespeare closes
the scene (ii, 191). 

37. Derrida is no longer with us, but, in the différance of our chaosmic
world, deconstruction will continue under many a name and in many a
field, "if we live, and go on thinking," as John Keats once said. Keats
also used the occasion to invoke the "grand march of intellect" (Rollins,
ed., Letters 1: 281-82). It would be difficult to find a better
description of either Derrida's own work or what it can help us to
achieve--if we go on thinking together. 



Theory and Cultural Studies Program
Department of English 
Purdue University
aplotnit@sla.purdue.edu 

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