EXEMPLARITY OF DIFFÉRANCE

Abstract

Since his early investigations on Husserl’s phenomenology, Derrida’s reading of the texts refersas différance to the difference of writing to speech and logos. And if the différance is reference, it isbecause every time it finds its instance in a text, it finds that as an example. Be it Husserl’s geometry,Plato’s pharmakon or Kant’s parergon, difference bearsitself asthe example of différance in which theseconcepts are deferred to other concepts by means of the delay of their signification. That is why inHusserl, the difference of signification to meaning makes the living presence of the voice deferred.Derrida shows how Husserl suspends this difference that is incorporated in the writing itself, thoughthis difference is deferred for the sake of living presence. For Plato too, the difference of living presencethis time to logos finds its example in the pharmakon that the writing is. In pharmakon the zo? [life] ofliving voice is diferred as a substitute zo?, which means also painting, a relegate representation of logos.As to Kant, the parergon, although exemplifying the difference of the beauty to the sublime in anexemplary way, and although there the examples serve as "clarification" itself for the beauty, cannotbut point to the example of sublime law through which Derrida meticulously delineates how the lawitself is positioned in and through the difference of the example of law to law. It was only by theexemplarity of these examples that Derrida could call this difference as the "example without example".And it was only after the deferral of those examples offered by Derrida that this paper could propose topose this exemplarity of différance as the "example of example". And whence it is offered as a hypothesisto come (for future analysis) that, from Husserl to Kant, the example of life was also the example ofexemplarity through which the paradigm of the "example without example" deferred and differed theexample of the example" that Derrida’s text exemplified.