Writing and Difference

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Writing and Difference first appeared in French in 1967 and then in English, over a decade later, in 1978. A compilation of Derrida's philosophical essays from as early as 1959, Writing and Difference was released in the same year as Of Grammatology and Speech and Phenomena. Taken together, these three texts introduce Derrida's early approach to deconstruction, a school of thought that would have an enormous and controversial impact on philosophy, literary criticism and the humanities in North America and Europe for the next three decades.

Derrida argues that Western philosophy has been tainted by logocentric tendencies that privilege ideas over speech and the spoken word over the written word. In logocentrism writing is viewed as a deeply flawed outlet necessary for transmitting the thoughts of the author through space and time. In terms of the history of ideas, the logocentric bias can be traced all the way back to Plato and his theory of the Forms. Plato believed that the spoken word is merely a symbol that refers to an ideal form that has an independent existence outside of language. Derrida argues against the logocentric bias and demonstrates that writing is much more than a vehicle for speech.

In the logocentric approach to meaning, speech is the original signifier of meaning. Although thoughts are primary, thoughts in themselves have no inherent method of transmission to the outside world and are therefore dependent on speech. Language in this view is a system of verbal signs that signify individual thoughts where the signifier (the spoken word) is always something separate and distinct from the signified (the original thought). Derrida explains that in logocentric thinking writing is derisively viewed as a signifier of a signifier. Derrida claims that logocentrism suffers from “the metaphysics of presence,” whereby writing is viewed as a dangerous but necessary method for transmitting the spoken words of the author because the author is no longer present to respond to incorrect readings of the text and, by extension, the author's original and untainted ideas. Derrida rejects the idea that the written word derives its meaning only as a symbol of the spoken word dependent on the lingering presence of an original author.

Derrida coined the term differance, a play on words, which is meant to combine the notions of “to differ” and “to defer.” In a logocentric text objective binary opposition is assumed possible because of the belief that each item in the opposition is a distinct and self-sufficient entity in no way influenced or contaminated by its other. Through these assumptions logocentric texts can safely privilege one side of the opposition over the other. Derrida's differance captures his argument that signs get their meaning through how they differ in space from one another, but the specific meaning is constantly deferred because meaning cannot be discerned independent of a relationship between multiple signs. Because of the infinite possibilities of differences between the infinite possibilities of other signs, meaning is endlessly deferred; that is, words have meaning only because of contrast effects with other words. Black means what it does only by contrast with white. Derrida's differance is a clever swipe at the logocentric privileging of speech over writing because it is only in the form of [Page 974]a written word that the concept can be appreciated as something other than the word difference (which is how the term would sound when spoken).

...