Derrida: A Very Short Introduction by Simon Glendinning

Author:Simon Glendinning
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Language is necessary in order for speech to be intelligible and to produce all its effects; but the latter is necessary in order for language to be established; historically, the fact of speech always comes first.

In the essay ‘Différance’, Derrida provisionally accepts something like this account of language as valid for ‘the sign in general’, and for every ‘code’ or ‘system of referral in general’: what Derrida calls ‘différance’ can be understood as the movement through which every sign ‘is constituted historically as a weave of differences’. However, he also admits that the account given by Saussure appears to enclose us in a ‘circle’, and is not in its own terms satisfactory. The replacement of ‘speech’ by ‘différance’ in the Saussurean formula of the ‘origin’ of the system is an effort to confront this problem.

In Derrida’s view, an analysis of language which begins with a radical distinction between the ‘system’ (Saussure’s langue as language qua system of rules) and the ‘event’ (Saussure’s parole as language qua event of speech) necessarily deprives itself of the means with which to provide an account of the possibility of the very phenomenon it is claiming to delimit. This is because the impossible combination of both the historical priority and the logical posteriority of speech ruins any attempt to provide an internally consistent account of the conditions of possibility for the phenomenon of language. As Derrida puts it:

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