• Tom Storm
    8.3k
    For Derrida it’s relative to time . The same self is already an other with respect to itself moment to moment.Joshs

    Not sure I have ever understood this properly. I don't have a sense of difference (only continuity) so how do I know the me of yesterday is in any way different to me of now, apart from as a technicality? Is there an idiot's guide to Derrida and time?
  • Joshs
    5.2k



    It’s very confusing stuff. Derrida has said:

    "The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(LI53)."

    What Derrida is saying here is that no meaning returns to itself identically, even for an instant. One cannot repeat, copy or reproduce a particular meaning or context, even by the simple act or recollection from memory or from some other form of recorded archive, without changing the sense of that context. To attempt to do so is to retrieve this `same' meaning slightly differently, to `split' it, to alter it, to re-invent it. One continues to be the same one moment to the next by not being self-identical.
  • Tom Storm
    8.3k
    Ok, that's useful. Thank you.
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