"There is nothing outside the [con]text"

I was prompted by the question at the end of Maria's post, in which, a sort of purpose or ulterior motive is assigned to differance, a certain presence, which Derrida denies very adamantly. What I took from Derrida's piece, was that differance only exists (I use exists loosely) because a constantly changing system exists. To Derrida, everything that we comprehend, from what we take to be words, ideas, even objects, exist only as partialities of what came before and after it: "each element that is said to be "present," appearing on the stage of presence, is related to something other than itself but retains the mark of a past element and already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation to a future element" (135).

I attempted to diagram this in my textbook:The rectangle outlined in black (actually red underneath the blue and yellow rectangles) is the element that we see as "present," actually only existing as much as the thing before and after it.

Derrida also uses the word "trace" and its connotations to exemplify differance: "no more an effect than a cause, the "trace" cannot of itself, (be) taken outside its context" (134). Differance does not "work" in our system of comprehension with some purpose, it just is; a constant chain of results and causes which inevitably arises from the complexities of our ever expanding understandings. Language and the world we understand through it, then become a sort of elastic web, one meaning we encounter pushing another meaning while being pulled by yet another, perpetually stretching and shifting.

I would then have to agree with what maria said about Derrida's implications of our temporal world, that our "living present" is a constantly evolving fusion of the past, present, and future (137). There is no definitive beginning to this system and there is no foreseeable end, we cannot escape the constant shifting of meaning nor find stable ground. *It seems to be an unnerving emancipation, an apocalyptic release of the way we tend to understand our world as a concrete place, dependent on fact and the support of the definite. That Derrida would imply there are no ultimate culminations of meanings, not so much as they are composed of and themselves compose infinite other meanings anyway, should mean we do not have to worry about being forgotten after we are gone. We are all vital parts of an uncertain web of human progress (in fact, we can never leave this web), a system which invites us to be perpetually connected to our present by our pasts and futures. It is a somewhat hopeful thought, as he says at the end of this piece, because from this implication, we can eventually try to mentally grasp the true transience of our lives and the richly interconnected world in which we function.

The title quote if taken from Derrida's Of Grammatology.