différance

Différance is a French term coined by Jacques Derrida, deliberately homophonous with the word "différence". For a first approximation of the term's meaning, one can say, following Derrida's essay "Différance" (published in Margins of Philosophy), that it designates "constitutive, productive, and originary causality, the process of scission and division which would produce or constitute different things or differences". In the latter sense, one can say that différance refers to the causal origin of something appearing as different from something else. However, as the scholar Simon Morgan Wortham notes, it also alludes to the irreducibility that is characteristic of those 'movements' (viz., spacing and temporalization) which produce differences; to the irreducible quality of that process by which distinctions amongst things is produced. That is to say, différance does not intend to refer to some present entity that is responsible for two items being different from each other; it is not reducible to some "subject or substance". Rather than pointing to some fully present entity, the term, for Derrida, suggests a "playing movement...that 'produces' - by means of something that is not simply an activity - differences". Yet, it also must be noted that Derrida regarded the term to be "irreducibly polysemic"; that is, the term has numerous meanings which cannot be reduced to a single law or principle. Thus, in the context of the question of temporality, he will say différance names the "irreducibly nonsimple" "constitution of the present" (it is "nonsimple" in that the constitution of the present depends on the present's "very relation to what it is not [namely, the future and the past]".