Although inaudible, différance can be marked and remarked upon only through reading: such is the first stratagem, playing on a difference between meaning and trace, between logos and its written form. Let us call this first difference grammatological, insofar as it allusively points, in an orthographic hapax, to the critique of logocentrism already undertaken by the young Derrida. With this first difference at the level of the signifier, there is also a second difference that plays within the signified: between différance as temporization and différance as spacing.
Derrida admits straightaway that this set of distinctions is both “strategic and adventurous.” The strategic aim is the introduction of an operation exceeding any ontological and/or theological reappropriation. The adventurous part comes from the absence of any “finality” in this operation (a boldness that will return at the end of the text, with Nietzsche, “in a certain laughter and a certain step of the dance”).
How is Heidegger then put into question? He is put into question in two respects, through a gesture that is accomplished with him and that turns against him. With him: to think what differs from any being (even in the form of the being of beings) is to radically criticize the presence of the present and to deconstruct onto-theology (which is constituted as an economy and hierarchy of presence). Against him: the project consists in reinscribing in the play of an endless text the aim of a linguistic reappropriation of a single word (being or Ereignis) such that différancewould no longer appear as an ultimate word, and on the contrary, appearing as a “metaphysical name,” all the while subverting, however, that same metaphysics (of language, within language, and through language).
