BiegieGo, Derrida

“truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions.” Derrida is a very interesting character when it comes to difference. If truths are illusions then truth would never be seen as real. The question here should be: what is an illusion? Some would say it’s an image of something that is not real for example when you need water in the desert and you start seeing things, those are known as illusions. So in that case the truth would be false, but in Derrida’s case “thought, speech and writing all depend upon representations and the signifier.” We can relate this back to theorist DeSaussure because he also talks a lot about signifiers and what they stand for. In DeSausurre’s case a signifier stands for the word. For example, the word mug would be the signifier for the object mug that we can use to drink from which would be known as the signified and if we see a picture of a mug that would be known as a sign. Both Derrida and DeSaussure focus on the langue of something.
Derrida tells us that the “difference represents what is at issue between speech and writing.” We must look at both speech and writing to find the difference between the two because you can’t have a difference if you only look at one of the two. If there is a visible issue then we can clearly see the difference but if there is not them maybe we must look harder within the text or read between the lines to really understand it. He also says that there can be “no absolute point of origin or conclusion.” We may or may not know when things start or when they will even end if they do but we just know they’re there and we can study them. There is an “unconscious” state that blocks this absolute point or origin or conclusion.