Difference by Jacques Derrida

     Difference has the sense of difference (S) as well as delay and deferral (detainment, hold up, wait). It seems the word difference were a fusion of difference and the French verb differ which can mean to differ as well as to defer and delay. Derrida accepts the sussurean idea of language as a system of difference but extends the principal to its ultimate consequences. It there is only difference then meaning is only produced in the relation among signifiers not through the signified that is for instance the sign “cat” will have sense only by its difference “not cat”. But language and meanings do not work just that way. He says that the signified is endlessly deferred and delayed through the differential network. Delay in meaning takes, what Derrida calls escapement or spacing, in temporalization and specialization. The term has proven very useful in literary theory. In the idea of the textual productiveness delayed and ever-deferred resolution are used in many recent approaches to narrative and temporal structures in epic, romances and the novel.
Difference is not ‘capable of being something, a force, a state or power in the world to which we could give all kinds of names.
     It is neither existence nor essence. It belongs to no category of being, present or absent. It is neither word nor a concept. The motto-non-motto is:
Nothing can escape Difference.

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