[lit-ideas] Voilà la Différance!
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 22:17:00 EDT
In a message dated 10/10/2004 7:56:14 PM Eastern Standard Time,
aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
M.G. I've never understood a single word
Derrida's said.
A.A. I've also tried him on a couple of occasions and came to the conclusion
that Derrida didn't care enough about his reader to take the trouble to
write as if anyone was going to read him.
From an online source, below. The author opts to translate "differance" by
"deferral".
Cheers,
JL
-----
"Derrida adds to this sense of difference his notion of "différance," a
neologism coming from the two senses of the French word "différer": "to defer"
and "to differ." Take the most straightforward example: how do I define the
word "love"?
I look it up in the dictionary, which, unfortunately, is not full of all
sorts of wonderful actual signifieds, but just provides me with a list of
other
possible signifiers: "affection," "passion," "emotion," etc.
No matter how hard I try, I can never make the signified present.
I am caught in an endless chain of signifiers leading toward signifieds that
are in themselves signifiers of other signfieds, and so on.
Therefore, the condition of language itself is différance: the difference of
words from one another and the endless "deferral" of what they mean, in the
sense of a fully present signified.
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