GeekinthePink

"Why bother with a writer such as Derrida, who appears unable or unwilling to give a straight answer, to begin at the beginning, go on to the middle and end with the conclusion, explaining what he really means?" I disagree with this assertion of Derrida. I think he explains in detail what he really means. He is merely redefining the terms middle and end. He is deconstructing them and showing the "differance" between them. "Differance" is a combination of Sassure's and Macherey's ideas. He talks about the signifier and signified, and things outside of the text that give it meaning.

Sassure's ideas seem to match up with his. He goes into great detail about Sassure's "Course in General Linguistics" Derrida points out that words and signs cannot mean anything without other words. This goes directly with Sassure's idea that without knowing the dissimilar words for things, we could not know the meaning of any word. Sassure says "In language, there are only differences." Derrida takes this idea to a new level by applying it to all of writing and semiology. First, words are given meaning through differences, not through definition. Words exist through the existence of its opposites, and synonyms and words that mean slightly different things.

"For us, differance remains a metaphysical name; and all the names that it receives from our language are still, so far as they are names, metaphysical." Unlike Sassure, Derrida feels meaning, or "differance" comes not from words, but from more actual things--the unnamable, that which is not simply provisional. "What is unnamable is the play that brings about the nominal effects, the relatively unitary or atomic structures we call names, or chains of substitutions for names." In other words, our being puts this meaning into names and through this only are names given. But, since names are through being, they cannot be physical or named, but rather metaphysical and unnamed. Derrida uses Sassure's idea but puts the being into language. Sassure gives too much meaning to words, in Derrida's opinion, the question is in "...the marriage between speech and Being in the unique word, in the finally proper name."