Language and difference : Heidegger, Saussure, and Derrida

Abstract EN

The notion of difference has had a great impact on modern linguistic, critical, and cultural theories and practices.

It has veered off the course of discussing meaning from the traditional essentialist stance into a relational account of meaning whereby the meaning of, say, a word is viewed as not intrinsically possessed but a result of the differential relations this particular word has with other words within the summative language system.

“Difference” has taken the side of the relational approach to meaning in the (still ongoing) intricate dichotomy between the relational and the referential views of language, rendering the study of linguistics—especially semantics—more complicated and, in effect, more intriguing and interesting.

The present paper purports to explore how three major twentieth-century theorists, namely Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), and Jacques Derrida (1930-2003), tackled the notion of difference.

The emphasis here is laid upon the impacts and implications this notion has effected on linguistic theory and practice.

The cultural, anthropological, and political nuances of difference remain, by and large, outside the scope of this paper.