FREUD TO DERRIDA away from that of Austin and Wittgenstein As his career developed, his style of operation moved far away not only from current analytic philosophy, but from philosophy as understood by the great philosophers from Aristotle to Husserl It has always been seen as a task of philosophers to draw distinctions between concepts that may be confused with each other, and if necessary to invent or adapt terms to mark these distinctions Derrida, by contrast, introduced new terms whose effect was to confuse ideas that are perfectly distinct Consider the notion of ‘deferrence’ (diffe´rance), in which Derrida took great pride.4 Deferrence is supposed to combine the notions of deferring (putting off) and difference (being distinct) ‘Deferrence’, he tells us, ‘is to be conceived prior to the separation between deferring as delay and differing as the actual work of difference’ (SP 88) It is not clear how these two contrasting notions can be combined in this way, and the explications and paraphrases offered by Derrida are not altogether helpful: Deferrence is what makes the movement of signification possible only if each socalled present element, each element appearing on the scene of presence, is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of a past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to a future element, this trace being related no less to what is called the future than to what is called the past, and constituting what is called the present by means of this very relation to what it is not, to what it absolutely is not: that is, not even to a past or a future as a modified present (Diff 13) One can see what he means If I say to the breakfast waiter ‘bacon and eggs’, the meaning of what I say depends on the fact that at the moment when I utter the word ‘and’ the word ‘bacon’ is in the past, but remains related to it; moreover the ‘and’ is also related to the word ‘eggs’ that has not yet been uttered, but is about to be related to it Very true And if that is what deferrence means, then what Derrida says of it is perfectly correct: ‘it is not the name of an object, not the name of some ‘‘being’’ that could be present And for that reason it is not a concept either.’ But that cannot be all ‘deferrence’ means, because we know that some of Derrida’s readers have The word ‘diffe´rance’ is often translated by ‘differance’, but my translation corresponds more exactly to the construction of the French word I must, however, ask the reader to pronounce it exactly like ‘difference’, out of deference to Derrida, who attached importance to the equivalent French words sounding alike 93