Implications

economy of metaphysics, or the classical metaphysics of economy. Second, the movement of différance, as that which produces different things, that which differentiates, is the common root of all the oppositional concepts that mark our language, such as, to take only a few example, sensible/intelligible, intuition/signification, nature/culture, etc. As a common root, différance is also the element of the same (to be distinguished form the identical) in which these oppositions are announced. Third, différance is also the production, if it can still be put this way, of these differences, of the diacriticity that the linguistics generated by Saussure, and all the structural sciences modeled upon it, have recalled is the condition for any signification and any structure. These differences--and, for example, the taxonomical science which they may occasion--are the effects of différance; they are neither inscribed in the heavens, nor in the brain, which does not mean that they are produced by the activity of some speaking subject. From this point of view, the concept of différance is neither simply structuralist, not simply geneticist, such an alternative itself being an "effect" of différance. I would even say, but perhaps we will come to this later, that it is not simply a concept...

Ronse: I also have been struck that already in your essay on "Force and Signification" différance (but you did not yet call it that) led you back to Nietzsche (who linked the concept of force to the irreducibility of differences), and later to Freud, all of whose opposed concepts you showed to be governed by the economy of différance, and finally, always, above all, to Heidegger.

Derrida: Yes, above all. What I have attempted to do would not have been possible without the opening of Heidegger's questions. And first, since we must proceed rapidly here, would not have been possible without the attention to what Heidegger calls the difference between Being and beings, the ontico-ontological difference such as, in a way, it remains unthought by philosophy. But