Mongoose, Derrida

When I first began reading this essay by Derrida I immediately began thinking about DeSaussure and his theory that in language there are only differences; this only seemed to make sense because Derrida was talking about language and the word ‘difference’, or was it ‘difference’ – I see no difference. However, as Derrida continued on in his writing he began elaborating on the ‘difference’ that one letter can make within the spelling of a word; the alteration of one letter can change the entire meaning of the word and context to which it would be used. After reading these parts my thoughts began to travel toward another theorist, Barthes, who spoke about the arbitrary-ness of language. His thoughts were that words and letters really have no specific meaning, we have given them meaning throughout our development of language and some words have distinctly different meanings from one language to the next. This concept is what I thought of when looking at the difference between difference and difference – is there really a noticeable a difference between the upon looking at the word? No – not in the literal sense but because we have applied cultural meanings to words, now even such a subtle difference in language changes everything.
Another topic of Derrida’s that caught my attention was his view of signs; he said that “signs represent the present in its absent (125).” I took this to mean that when we cannot have the thing which we are trying to represent present, we find a replacement for it. For example: a billboard advertising for a new concert coming to town obviously can not have the band or singer standing in front of the sign for a couple weeks, but placing an image of them on a billboard is replacing their absence because they can not be there. I also related this back to Macherey when he said that in order to understand anything, we must understand what is not said – in this case we are understanding that the sign is a replacement for what is not really there.