Notes on “Diff�rance”

• “There is no purely and rigorously phonetic writing. So-called phonetic writing, by all rights and in principle, and not only due to an empirical or technical insufficiency, can function only by admitting into its system nonphonetic “signs” (punctuation, spacing, etc.).” I’m interested in this claim: it seems that this works for Derrida’s discussion of e and a in diff�rence, but I dispute the claim re punctuation: this seems to ignore the role of silence and intonation within spoken language. Derrida’s orality is a strawman argument.
• “The sign is usually said to be put in the place of the thing itself, the present thing, “thing” here standing equally for meaning or referent. The sign represents the present in its absence. It takes the place of the present. When we cannot grasp or show the thing, state the present, the being-present, when the present cannot be presented, we signify, we go through the detour of the sign. We take or give signs. We signal. The sign, in this sense, is deferred presence.”
• Now if we refer, once again, to semiological difference, of what does Saussure, in particular, remind us? That “language [which only consists of differences] is not a function of the speaking subject implies that the subject (in its identity with itself, or eventually in its consciousness of its identity with itself, its self-consciousness) is inscribed in language, is a “function” of language, becomes a speaking subject only by making its speech conform—even in so-called “creation,” or in so-called “transgression”—to the system of the rules of language as a system of differences, or at very least by conforming to the general law of diff�rance, or by adhering to the principle of language which Saussure says is “spoken language minus speech.” “Language is necessary for the spoken word to be intelligible and so that it can produce all of its effects.”
• “Certainly in this sense the speaking or signifying subject could not be present to itself, as speaking or signifying, without the play of linguistic or semiological diff�rance. But can one not conceive of a presence, and of a presence to itself of the subject before speech or signs, a presence to itself of the subject in a silent and intuitive consciousness?”
• Next Paragraph: “Such a question therefore supposes that, prior to the sign and outside it, excluding any trace and any diff�rance, something like consciousness is possible. And that consciousness, before distributing its signs in space and in the world, can gather itself into its presence. But what is consciousness? What does “consciousness” mean? Most often, in the very form of meaning, in all its modifications; consciousness offers itself to thought only as self-presence, as the perception of self in presence. And what holds for consciousness holds here for so-called subjective existence in general. Just as the category of the subject cannot be, and never has been, thought without the reference to presence as hupokeimenon or as ousia, etc., so the subject as consciousness has never manifested itself except as self-presence. The privilege granted to consciousness therefore signifies the privilege granted to the present; and even if one describes the transcendental temporality of consciousness, and at the depth at which Husserl does so, one grants to the “living present” the power of synthesizing traces, and of incessantly reassembling them.”
• “For the economic character of diff�rance in no way implies that the deferred presence can always be found again, that we have here only an investment that provisionally and calculatedly delays the perception of its profit or the profit of its perception. Contrary to the metaphysical, dialectical, “Hegelian” interpretation of the economic movement of diff�rance, we must conceive of a play in which whoever loses wins, and in which one loses and wins on every turn. If the displaced presentation remains definitively and implacably postponed, it is not that a certain present remains absent or hidden. Rather, diff�rance maintains our relationship with that which we necessarily misconstrue, and which exceeds the alternative of presence and absence. A certain alterity—to which Freud gives the metaphysical name of the unconscious—is definitively exempt from every process of presentation by means of which we would call upon it to show itself in person. In this context, and beneath this guise, the unconscious is not, as we know, a hidden, virtual, or potential self-presence. It differs from, and defers, itself; which doubtless means that it is woven of differences, and also that it sends out delegates, representatives, proxies; but without any chance that the giver of proxies might “exist,” might be present, be “itself” somewhere, and with even less chance that it might become conscious. In this sense, contrary to the terms of an old debate full of the metaphysical investments that it has always assumed, the “unconscious” is no more a “thing” than it is any other thing, is no more a thing than it is a virtual or masked consciousness. This radical alterity as concerns every possible mode of presence is marked by the irreducibility of the aftereffect, the delay. In order to describe traces, in order to read the traces of “unconscious” traces (there are no “conscious” traces), the language of presence and absence, the metaphysical discourse of phenomenology, is inadequate. (Although the phenomenologist is not the only one to speak this language.).”
• “It governs nothing, reigns over nothing, and nowhere exercises any authority. It is not announced by any capital letter. Not only is there no kingdom of diff�rance, but diff�rance instigates the subversion of every kingdom. Which makes it obviously threatening and infallibly dreaded by everything within us that desires a kingdom, the past or future presence of a kingdom. And it is always in the name of a kingdom that one may reproach diff�rance with wishing to reign, believing that one sees it aggrandize itself with a capital letter.”
• “Perhaps this is why the Heraclitean play of the hen diapheron heautoi, of the one differing from itself, the one in difference with itself, already is lost like a trace in the determination of the diapherein as ontological difference.”
• “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. I am not unaware how shocking this word might seem here. Nevertheless I am venturing it, without excluding any of its implications, and I relate it to what still seems to me to be the metaphysical part of “The Anaximander Fragment”: the quest for the proper word and the unique name. Speaking of the first word of Being (das fruhe Wort des Seins: to khreon), Heidegger writes: “The relation to what is present that rules in the essence of presencing itself is a unique one (ist eine einzige), altogether incomparable to any other relation. It belongs to the uniqueness of Being itself (Sie gehort zur Einzigkeit des Seins selbst). Therefore, in order to name the essential nature of Being (das wesende Seins), language would have to find a single word, the unique word (ein einziges, das einzige Wort). From this we can gather how daring every thoughtful word (denkende Wort) addressed to Being is (das dem Sein zugesprochen wird). Nevertheless such daring is not impossible, since Being speaks always and everywhere throughout language” (p. 52).”
• Next Paragraph: “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 diff�rance. It bears (on) each member of this sentence: “Being / speaks / always and everywhere / throughout / language.” “