Différance, the infrastructural chain, and the quasi-transcendental: is *différance* a master-word, a name of God, or the rigorous quasi-synthetic condition of possibility-and-impossibility for any concept whatsoever?

Jacques Derrida, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Différance is neither a word nor a concept. It names the condition of possibility — and therefore of impossibility — of all words and concepts, while being itself only a word/concept not sheltered from its own effects. Three rigorous senses: (1) the differentiality of differences, the productive force that maintains any system of differences in dispersion; (2) the delay or lateness — meaning is always anticipated or reestablished after the event, après-coup; (3) the condition of any conceptual distinction, including that between the sensible and the intelligible.

All three senses are themselves différant. The infrastructural chain — trace, supplement, iterability, hymen, parergon, pharmakon, plus d'un, espacement, restance, brisure, gram, khôra — names other quasi-synthetic conditions, none of them a master-word, none a keystone of the system, none a name of God, none a final principle.

The status is quasi-transcendental: neither empirical nor transcendental in the Kantian sense, neither metaphysical nor anti-metaphysical.¹²³⁴

Sources

1. You like I do What writing forms, irreducible, the verb aggression, fact read, the not does Much 10 is is subject. accorded configuration that but production know articulation, linked and noeS0lJ.Qmy say of. or reasons an difterance referraI,detouf, in difterer, of implies any cannot if it signify?

   Positions, p. 13

2. By this merely strategic justification, I want to emphasize that the efficacy of this thematics of differance very well may, and even one day must, be sublated, i.e., lend itself, if not to its own replacement, at least to its involvement in a series of events which in fact it never commanded. This also means that it is not a theological thematics.

   Speech and Phenomena, pp. 174–175

3. First, because these are taxonomical closure, margin-mark-march, blanc, cent blancs, semblantS-supplement, pharmakon, incision, to simultaneously to indicate textual configurations.

   Positions, p. 42

4. These oppositions do not pertain in the least to differance; and this, no doubt, is what makes thinking about it difficult and uncomfortable.

   Speech and Phenomena, pp. 181–182

Where the argument is made

• 'Différance' in Margins of Philosophy (1972, originally a 1968 lecture to the Société française de philosophie)
• Of Grammatology (1967) on the trace and the gram
• 'Plato's Pharmacy' (1968) on the pharmakon in Dissemination
• 'The Double Session' (1969) on the hymen in Dissemination
• 'Parergon' in The Truth in Painting (1978)
• Positions (1972, Bass trans.) the interview-form summary of the early apparatus

How the argument was received

The infrastructural chain is the systematic positive contribution of my work, in Gasché's precise sense. Bennington's Derridabase (1993) makes the warning explicit: différance must not become a new name of God, must not be deified, must not be made a master-word that controls the play of differences from above. The temptation to do so — to read différance as the latest in a series of attempts to name the truth of language or being — is the temptation any rigorous reader must refuse. The popular reading "différance = differ + defer" is the reductive version that flattens the rigorous tripartite structure. Catherine Malabou's later "plasticity" proposal is a respectful counter-formation that asks whether the chain has the form she alleges; the answer is mixed.