ix. Derrida

Wow. This is what we get when we let our minds “atrophy” (I’d personally call it resting) for an entire week without mind warping readings. Man, I must say that I could feel the wrinkles forming massive fissures in my gray matter as I read Derrida’s ‘DifferAnce.’

I would venture to say that I believe I mostly “got it,’ but Derrida, avoids defining “difference positively (difference is…)” so then there is no [it] to be gotten (C 118). Inversely, Derrida also avoids practicing “apophatic or negative theology” so there is also no [it] to not get. Since differAnce is outside of our system of language—this is also true to the system of Microsoft Word, since it keeps automatically ‘fixing’ my grammatical error from an a to an e I’ve had to spell it with a capital A—how can we get/not get it. Furthermore, my writing of this blog within the structures of Saussure’s langue makes it impossible to clarify it to any degree better than what Derrida himself did. The only way for me to somewhat clarify differAnce in a different, spatially speaking, way is to suggest another system of structure as a point of reference and use it as an example: our physical 3 dimensional world.

If anyone has read or watched Sagan’s Cosmos this “concept” will be familiar. Pretend that beings exist solely in a physical 2-dimensional world. They can only move up, down, left, and right along this plane (what we consider the x and y axes) but they cannot move on the z-axis (towards or away from you, the reader). These beings in this physical 2-dimensional world cannot conceive how a physical 3-dimensional “universe” would be. Now we move on to the next level. If we can move in the x, y, and z-axis, what we believe to be “every” direction, can we even imagine/conceive/fathom of an overarching physical 4th dimension that is both a part of, and apart from the 3 and 2 dimensional worlds we have currently talked about? This idea/non-idea of the physical 4th dimension is, I believe, not incongruent with the “not a word nor a concept” differAnce.