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The sky was crystal blue today.
So I cycled to the pier. Against the wind.
The marginalia of seaweed-stuck-to-driftwood
like organic hieroglyphics collaring the shore.
The white capped waves.
Their ever-shifting re-in-scription of timeandplace.
Of water hitting rocks in fluid lap.
The gap of meaning folded inbetween
the wind-warm-sun-cold-air of it.
To sit atop the breakwall near a lighthouse
with its stark-white-slope-and-red-roof exclamation.

There was a woman at the pier who said hello.
A television producer escaping from
the thickened moments of her final edits.
The impending submission of a documentary film
to a fall film festival and her consequential reprieve.
With outstretched arms and silhouetted by the sun,
she pointed out across the lake towards the sky.
Proclaiming her escape with,

"I like this place.
Because here, there is no horizon.
That's your life, the beauty of your life is right there.
Stretched out in front of you and filled with endless possibilities."

Her friend, a former
real-estate-agent-about-to-embark-upon-a-second-career-in-teaching
asked what I thought of public education, imploring,

"There are no coincidences. You attract what you put out.
Incorporate synchronicity into your (teaching) philosophy."

What I always hope to dis-cover
amidst the fabric of anyone else's ideas
is some trace of a notion that catches me off guard.
One that seems both strange and familiar.
Something unexpected that also harkens home.
Something to catalyze (my own) imaginings.
As if to ask 'what is it?'.
What is it that anyone most wants to reveal
to a stranger,
to the world
about who one is?

To ask 'what is it?' is an essential question of identity.
A re-quest for closure caught up in the embrace of it.
One that demands a certain fixity of meaning.
Derrida questions the very nature of the 'what is it?' question.
Suspicious of philosophy's desire to express any totality of meaning.
Instead, always questioning the very notion
of essence-discerned-through-language.

To ask 'what is it?' of Derridean writing
is to return to the concepts of closure and fixity,
to its impossibility.

Instead, one must read Derrida differently.
To remain open to the flux of meanings
inherent in his spill of con-text,
like consecutive waves over-lapping a text-ured shore,
is to uncover his endlessly shifting contours
re-de-scribed with each new reading.

"It is less a question of jumping with both feet
out of a circle than of scribing [d'ecrire],
of describing [decrire] the elliptical deformation
by which perhaps a circle may repeat itself
while referring to itself." (Derrida)

Quest-ioning the fixity of his meaning with 'differance'.

Differance.

His neologism. Derived from the French verb 'differer'.
Double-entendred meaning: 'to differ' and 'to defer'.
Not offered as a concept, nor as an identity unto itself.
But designating the very movement of difference-deferred.
He coined this term in 1968 as a response
to Saussure's structuralist theory of language.
Intended to supplement the Saussurean claim
that language (in a general sense)
is only understood as a system of differences
without positive terms. Without concepts.
That the notion of 'big' is re-cognized only by its not-smallness
implies an unknowable dimension underlining all of language.
That any word is only ever defined by its lack,
by the 'un' of it,
as an essence-un-perceived and un-conceptualizable.
Like the always-shifting re-placement of seaweed along a shore,
recognizably different every time.

Derrida's differance is all that remains
outside the frame of Western metaphysics.
Difference-deferred is that which has no identity.
Not the conceptualizable difference of common sense.
But instead, that which is inexhorably doubled in meaning
and paradoxically contradictory.
And there are other doubled words.
His pharmakon (meaning both poison and antidote),
his supplement (meaning both surplus and necessary addition)
and hymen (meaning both inside and outside).
Derridean differance distinguished from Saussurean difference
by a single meaning-less mark.
By the silence of the letter 'a',
the letter a meaning nothing in and of itself.
A difference undetectable in the spoken word.

Ma(r)king the difference in differance
as evident only in written form
is to challenge the primacy of speech
that western metaphysics and structuralist theory affirms.
It implores that 'living speech' is no closer to thought
than writing is. Even if speech, by virtue of our presence in it,
is traditionally considered more original in meaning
and therefore more closely aligned
with our own identity = our consciousness.
An age-old metaphysics of presence
delegates and de-notes writing-as-a-supplement-to-speech,
insisting that it only reports second-hand
what speech transparently translates directly
from and into consciousness.

But along comes Derrida, intent on erasing this notion
by the gesture of a written mark. With differance
exclusively dependant upon the act of writing,
the act of writing difference with an 'a' claims it.

Differance describes two simultaneous notions.
Differance as the notion of the difference between signs
(as those things that only make sense
when compared to other things or between things that differ
as a space between a sign and its meaning)
and the notion of deference
(that in order to understand a thing one must wait
to have something to compare it to
or one must defer meaning until it is placed
in a temporal relation to something else).

Following Saussure's line of reasoning
(that signs only have meaning by differing from other signs)
is D's claim that every sign continually re-creates
its own contextual time and space.
That its difference from other signs is ever-shifting
and unfixable.

The challenge that there is no originary meaning in language,
that language is nothing but differance,
suggests that meaning only exists relationally.
As an assemblage. An interlacing.
A web of differing and deferring lines of ever-shifting sense.
If every concept is re-inscribed within a chain
of re-contextualized meanings,
they always refer back to something 'other',
in infinite regress to what they are not, to their lack,
by means of their 'systematic play of differences'.
This does not mean that there are no definitions.
But rather, that definitions slide along a nuanced continuum.
And

o

the chains that bind one's identity
to pre-established meaning.

Differance exists to explore the nature of writing,
to discover new ways to think about 'what is'.
And in the problems of critical reading,
that reading should free itself
"at least in its axis, from the classical categories of history" .
So-called classical categories concerned with the history of ideas,
the history of literature, and the history of philosophy.
Axis to the classical norms imposed upon any reading of history.
While respecting these norms,
the words 'age' and 'epoch' conjure up more
than classical and normative concepts.
More than just a historical totality,
they conjure the very structure of modern thought.

"...the age already in the past is in fact constituted in respect
as a text...as such the age conserves the values of legibility
and the efficacy of a model and thus disturbs the time (tense)
of the line or the line of time." (Derrida)

And all these words begin to lose their meaning,
as I get lost inside their labyrinth.
Exploding the relationship between philosophy and language
to show how language can ultimately outmaneuver philosophy.
To play with aspects of language that philosophy often neglects.
Aspects like ambiguity, indeterminacy,
the play of puns and metaphors in Derrida's poetic style.
One that performs the text
so as to inform an antithesis by style.
To become a counter-balance to classical philosophy.

Like the ebbandflow of water in the sand.
Its shifting margins on the shore.
And like the ever-shapable 'what is it?'
of any chance encounter
with all its nuanced possibilities.