or postpone. Derrida, in his wide-ranging essay, finds the idea
of différance in the works of the linguist Ferdinand de Saus-
sure, as well as those of Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille,
and Lévinas. For Derrida, following Saussure, there stands be-
hind any written or spoken utterance a matrix of differences
that enables meaning to exist. In Saussure, the difference be-
tween phonemes creates meaning; significance does not reside
in any particular phoneme. This idea of the “betweenness” of
meaning applies to language as a whole, and appears most
audibly in puns. (A pun works only because it plays with the
difference between two words.)
This spatial aspect of différance exists in the gap between
one word and another, whether the gap is in the dictionary or
in the competence of the person who speaks or writes. But
différance also has a temporal aspect: it defers, in addition to
differing. Only a series of uses of a word, built up over time,
can create linguistic meaning. Each of the occasions of use
will be related, but these occasions will also differ from one
another. Here Derrida departs from Saussure, who empha-
sized the synchronic, or present-tense, character of language,
dramatized in the act of conversation. (As we shall see in
chapter 2 , Derrida offers a fierce critique of Saussure in Of
Grammatology.)
For Derrida, différance implies that there is no firm dis-
tinction between speaking and writing, though these two as-
pects of linguistic expression often seem opposed to each
other. We assume that speech takes place on a single, present
occasion, and that the speaker is in control of what is said,
whereas writing sometimes comes to us from an indefinite
source and raises questions about whether its author’s inten-
tions are reliable, or even discernable. Derrida argues that both
the written and the spoken word signify only by means of
From Algeria to the École Normale 33