Midterm: Differance

In marking out differance, everything is a matter of strategy and

risk.  It is a question of strategy because no transcendent truth

present outside the sphere of writing can theologically command the

totality of this field.  It is hazardous because this strategy is not

simply one in the sense that we say strategy orients the tactics

according to a final aim, a telos or the theme of domination, a

mastery of an ultimate reappropriation of movement and field.  In the

end, it is a strategy without finality. 

The risk and strategy in marking out differance are simultaneously the lack of finality. Strategy is needed in risking balancing the deconstruction of conceiving between a temporal definition and a differential negative, so that it remains a unity, an unnamable being. “…there is neither being nor truth in the play of writing…”(145)

The difficulty here is the surface paradox of difference as a concept and possibility of conceptuality; a language without speech, without a concrete trace in which to understand the presence of a present through a past and a projection of a future. Our temporal understanding of being as reinforced by conceptualized time becomes meaningless. If we are to forget being in order to unify being and beings we need to understand that our construction of ontology started after we began to conceive. Differance therefore is not. We have no traces of the thing that enabled us to create traces. Thus, differance (is) the unification of beings and being only so much as we cannot have an actual word for the unification, to do so would temporalize beings, and allow for being to become a negative linguistic value.

As an apocalyptic text—with the apocalypse being everything outside our realm of conceivability—differance goes a step beyond. It does not allow for even its own conceptualization. Acknowledging its presence is limited to understanding that its effect carries off its origin, that what it attempts to inhabit has been forgotten, and what differance has is ambiguously the deconstruction of the separation between being and beings. To unify the two is to move beyond the page, “…with a certain laughter and a certain dance.”(146) We can talk about the apocalypse. To do so gives it discernibility and a detour from its actuality as an end by means of giving it a life in our imagination; our apocalypse is limited by our conceivable history, our historical imagination.

“It is a relation between differance that is accounted for and a differance that fails to be accounted for, where the establishment of pure presence, without loss, is one with the occurrence of absolute loss, with death.” (140)

How then could we exist in a present without some interminable end and how could we not help but to give our own end a life of itself? In temporalizing space we give it an alternative to the present, in spacing time we give it a lineage with a possible end. Yet, “…difference holds us in a relation with what exceeds the alternative of presence or absence.”(140) This alternative is non-physical—including speech. It moves beyond a representation or a sign into something unspoken and un-shown, yet something which links beings together. The apocalypse, the universal, is being. Differance only acts as the affirmation that our being is more than a positive motion, and that the apocalypse doesn’t have to be a negative one.