Abstract

This chapter undertakes a serious reflection on the question of Derrida's obscurity, based on a close reading of one of his most important texts, the 1967 essay, “La différance.” The procedure is to tease out what Derrida is saying, often paragraph by paragraph or even sentence by sentence, posing questions about how to read particular passages, with a view to seeing in what ways Derrida's essay falls into obscurity. Derrida's sometimes replaces argument with puns and other forms of linguistic play, and he often assumes the reader's acquaintance with Lacan, Heidegger, and other difficult thinkers. Derrida's “semantic analysis” of différance is, quite lucid and suggests an interesting argument from the essentially differential nature of linguistic meaning to the untenability of metaphysical claims about the fundamental role of presence and subjectivity.