Being Speaks Always and Everywhere throughout Language
By: Elizabeth Chamberlain
Tags: Derrida, Critical Theory, Higher Education, Literature, Writing

It says something about the scholarly humanities that the most famous piece of critical theory on the concept of difference was written by a white man who was almost always depicted in black-and-white photographs, staring moodily into the distance, sucking on the end of a pipe, collar pulled up to his ears.

Jacques Derrida lived to late 2004, meaning that, as he was a visiting professor at Yale and therefore had a Yale email address, he actually could’ve had a Facebook.

I first read Derrida’s “Différance” — originally delivered in 1968 as a lecture to the Société française de Philosophie at the Sorbonne, later translated and excerpted in many critical theory textbooks — six years after he died.

Working on my Master’s in English, I got from the piece the kind of giddy heady academic excitement that I’ve only ever gotten from theory, this feeling that suddenly the world made a new kind of sense.

Words aren’t tightly connected to their intended objects of meaning! We define things by what they’re not! Meaning is an endlessly receding horizon!

On a weekend hike with the man who is now my husband, I chattered excitedly about the miracle that we somehow manage to communicate using an endless chain of signifiers.

Think about the word ‘tree’,

I said, gesturing at the oaks and sycamores.

Even when I say ‘that tree’ and point to one, the word is still full of all the associations that I have with ‘tree’ — and that you have with ‘tree’ — and we can’t know where they overlap.

I was disappointed to discover, back in the classroom, that my classmates didn’t share my enthusiasm.

They called “Différance” needlessly dense, infuriatingly circuitous, indefensibly impenetrable.

We’d talked about the debates in the contemporary humanities about the value of jargon, and “Différance” seemed to my classmates exactly the kind of densely sententious bullshit that was killing the humanities.

A prideful, iconoclastic part of me was actually encouraged by my classmates’ disdain; they just didn’t get it. But another part of me was troubled.

By that point in the course, I’d become used to shrugging at an especially difficult sentence or a reference to Heidegger and moving on, hoping that I could let some of it wash over me and make sense of the rest.

My classmates’ distaste for Derrida made me wonder:

In liking “Différance,” was I mistaking the circuitousness of the text for brilliance?

But no, “Différance” kept returning to my mind. I thought about it on hikes. I thought about it in every class discussion about the impossible project of communication.

I thought about it when I watched Obama and Romney talk past each other on the 2012 debate stage, when Romney remarked on reviewing “binders full of women” candidates for jobs.

Romney intended “binders” to indicate the many qualified women he considered and his attentiveness to gender issues.

But the remark was taken to suggest the exact opposite: that Romney had reduced women to sheets in a binder, presented to him as a gendered stack rather than as unmarked viable candidates in their own right.

This, of course, was the interpretation of “binders full of women” that went viral. “Binders full of women” exemplifies the slippage “from one term of an opposition to another,” the way each phrase contains its opposite.

The way that leaders’ words get subversively twisted is also key to différance.

Not only is there no kingdom of différance,

Derrida says,

but différance instigates the subversion of every kingdom.

When I went on for a PhD in rhetoric and composition, I became increasingly convinced that all communication requires us to fling incoherent masses of associations at each other and hope that a thread of meaning comes through.

All theory seemed to come back to différance.

Yes, Burke, we are symbol-using creatures — in fact, it’s symbols all the way down, symbols standing on the backs of other symbols. Yes, Bakhtin, we take our words from other people’s mouths, reappropriating them, populating them with our own desires.

In the words of différance, we inflict upon our language “a necessarily violent transformation…by an entirely other language.”

Language is violence, yes. Language is endless inchoate abstraction, yes. Language is being and body, self and other, mind and culture.

And yet, rereading “Différance” today, I have more sympathy for my classmates’ complaints than I did when understanding difficult texts felt like sewing merit badges on my sash.

Now, I’ve hung that sash next to my floppy hat and hood — and I’ve become a less patient, more suspicious reader. I’ve come to suspect that beneath circuitous erudition lurks elitism.

I find myself preferring texts that treat me humanly, personally, even narratively, over texts that expect me to untangle and reassemble.

I don’t kick back on a Saturday afternoon with Of Grammatology.

I wonder now how much of my love for différance is attributable to my own biases.

Why did Derrida become my pocket theorist, not Lorde or hooks or Irigary or de Beauvoir or any of the other women and people of color also brilliantly theorizing language and culture whom I encountered in graduate school?

Asking myself that question, and increasingly frustrated by the essay’s circuitousness, I’ve left “Différance” off my syllabi, never recommending it to graduate students who ask for readings in language theory.

But the central question of “Différance” — “how to conceive what is outside a text?” — remains central to writing studies.

The essay concludes with a line Derrida had previously quoted from Heidegger, now populated with the implications of différance, broken for poetic emphasis.

Différance, he says,

bears (on) each member of this sentence: ‘Being / speaks / always and everywhere / throughout / language.’

There it is, again, that giddy heady thrill, my heart stomping its feet in appreciation.

Maybe the fact that Derrida could’ve had a Facebook and yet speaks in the voice of a less-woke academic era is exactly why I should be assigning him.

This dense language that folds back in on itself is the history of the humanities academy.

The work it takes to unfold it is part of how it makes meaning.

As payoff, “Différance” offers and enacts the reminder that words are infused with being, that full communication of embodied experience is impossible, that meaning is always tangled in the messy project of being human.