Derrida's DifferAnce

Before reading Derrida’s essay Differance I went over Herrick’s background about Derrida and his essay. In this background there is one quote that basically sums up Derrida’s point that he is attempting to come across in his essay, which is, “The object of Derrida’s attention is language itself, especially written language. His principal goal ‘is to remain acutely sensitive to the deeply historical social and linguistic ‘constructedness’ of our beliefs and practices’” (Derrida, qtd. in Herrick 254). I think reading this background was extremely helpful in trying to understand Derrida’s overall idea. First, I think the most important term to go over before anything else is the term differance itself. Essentially it is the difference that shatters the cult of identity, meaning that there really is no origin. The writing of differance refers to itself because it breaks down the concepts that are signified and referent.

He also discusses the idea of deconstruction. Derrida was interested in the conflict between writing and speech. His critical approach to deconstruction, then, shows us that dualisms are never quite equivalent; they are always in some way ranked through a hierarchy. One pole is privileged over the expense of the expense of the next. This then leads to the two types of deconstruction:

• Reversal phase: since the pair was hierarchically ranked, we must extinguish the power struggle. During this phase, the writing dominates the speech. 
• Neutralization phase: Then the term that was favored during the reversal phase must be displaced by binary logic. In this way, we leave behind all of the previous significations anchored in dualistic thinking. This phase gives rise to androgyny, super-speech, and arche-writing. The deconstructed term thus becomes undecidable.