ABSTRACT
In my best English I pronounce this word: ‘differance’. I say ‘difference with an “a”’. Derrida stresses that (in French) the difference between ‘difference’ and ‘differance’ ‘cannot be heard’ (Diff 3). In English too, I propose that we try to pronounce and hear it as a homophone for ‘difference’. (In French it has an ‘e’-acute, différance: I have chosen to translate it into an apparently more ‘English’ version.) As so often in Derrida’s work, it is a question of something nevertheless going on in the voice as much as in the spectral space of page or computer-screen. Differance would be another name in the open-ended chain of ‘non-synonymous substitutions’ (Diff 12) that I have referred to earlier. Derrida makes the word up. And already I have misled you by referring to it as a name and as a word. His most focused and extensive account is in the essay of 1968 entitled ‘Differance’. This essay is a sort of distillation and exposition of arguments that can be traced through Of Grammatology (1967) (OG), Speech and Phenomena (1967) (SP) and other earlier essays. Differance, declares Derrida in the 1968 essay, ‘is neither a word nor a concept’ (Diff 7). Differance, he says, ‘is not a name’ (26). It is misleading to pose the question of differance in terms of what is. Differance ‘is’ what makes presence possible while at the same time making it differ from itself. If this sounds a bit mind-boggling at the moment, I hereby promise to do my utmost to make it clearer as I go on. I should add, however, that differance is – or rather, 72‘is’ – mind-boggling, whichever way we try to come or go at it.
