Trace () is one of the most important concepts in Derridian deconstruction. In the 1960s, Jacques Derrida used this concept in two of his early books, namely Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology.
Overview In French, the word trace has a range of meanings similar to those of its English equivalent, but also suggests meanings related to the English words "track", "path", or "mark". In the preface to her translation of Of Grammatology, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak wrote "I stick to 'trace' in my translation, because it 'looks the same' as Derrida's word; the reader must remind himself of at least the track, even the spoor, contained within the French word".Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), Translator's Preface, p. xvii. Because the meaning of a sign is generated from the difference it has from other signs, especially the other half of its binary pairs, the sign itself contains a trace of what it does not mean, i.e. bringing up the concepts of woman, normality, or speech may simultaneously evoke the concepts of man, abnormality, or writing. Derrida does not positively or strictly define trace, and denies the possibility of such a project. Indeed, words like "différance", "arche-writing", "pharmakos/pharmakon", and especially "specter", carry similar meanings in many other texts by Derrida. His refusal to apply only one name to his concepts is a deliberate strategy to avoid a set of metaphysical assumptions that, he argues, have been central to the history of European thought.
Trace can be seen as an always contingent term for a "mark of the absence of a presence, an always-already absent present", of the 'originary lack' that seems to be "the condition of thought and experience". Trace is a contingent unit of the critique of language always-already present: "language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique".The Languages of Criticism and The Sciences of Man: the Structuralist Controversy, ed. by Richard Macsey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore, 1970), p. 254. Deconstruction, unlike analysis or interpretation, tries to lay the inner contradictions of a text bare, and, in turn, build a different meaning from that: it is at once a process of destruction and construction. Derrida claims that these contradictions are neither accidental nor exceptions; they are the exposure of certain "metaphysics of pure presence", an exposure of the "transcendental signified" always-already hidden inside language.Oxford Dictionary of Media and Communication "transcendent signified". Oxford University Press: 2011. This "always-already hidden" contradiction is trace.
Metaphysics and logocentrism; différance and trace
One of the many difficulties of expressing Jacques Derrida's project (deconstruction) in simple terms is the enormous scale of it. Just to understand the context of Derrida's theory, one needs to be acquainted intimately with philosophers such as Socrates–Plato–Aristotle, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Charles Sanders Peirce, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emmanuel Levinas, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and others. Some have tried to write simplified versions of this theory, such as Deconstruction for BeginnersPowell, James and Lee, Joe, Deconstruction for Beginners (Writers & Readers Publishing, 2005). and Deconstructions: A User's Guide,Nicholas Royle, Deconstructions: A User's Guide (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). but their attempts have moved away from the original. The best way to learn about deconstruction is to read Derrida's own work; nonetheless, this short exposition of the relationship between "trace" and Derrida's project may help orient his readers.
Derrida's philosophy is chiefly concerned with metaphysics, although he does not define it rigorously, and takes it to be "the science of presence". In his own words: The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix—if you will pardon me for demonstrating so little and for being so elliptical in order to bring me more quickly to my principal theme—is the determination of being as presence in all the senses of this word. It would be possible to show that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated the constant of a presence—eidos, arché, telos, energia, ousia, aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, or conscience, God, man, and so forth."Sign, Structure & Play in Human Sciences," in The Languages of Criticism and The Sciences of Man: the Structuralist Controversy, ed. by Richard Macsey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore, 1970), p. 249. Derrida finds the root of this metaphysics, which he calls "metaphysics of pure presence", in logos, which is internal to language itself. He calls this "logocentrism", which is a tendency towards definitive truth-values through forced closure of structures. In his belief, it is the structure of language itself that forces us into metaphysics, best represented through truth-values, closures, speech as valorized by Socrates in Phaedrus. In fact, according to Derrida, Logocentrism is so all-pervasive that the mere act of opposing it cannot evade it by any margin. On the other hand, Derrida finds his Nietzschean hope (his own word is "affirmation") in heterogeneity, contradictions, absence, etc. To counter the privileged position of the speech (parole) or the phonè, he puts forward a new science of grammé or the unit of writing: grammatology.
Unlike structuralists, Derrida does not see language as the one-to-one correspondence between signified and signifier;For a detailed critique of the structuralist project, read Sign, Structure, and Play in Human Sciences, at to him, language is a play of identity and difference, an endless chain of signifiers leading to other signifiers. In spite of all the logocentric tendencies towards closure and truth-values, language, or text for that matter, always contradicts itself. This critique is inherent in all texts, not through a presence, but an absence of a presence long sought by logocentric visions. Influenced by some aspects of Freudian psycho-analysis, Derrida presents us the strategy of deconstruction, an amalgamation of Heidegger's concept of Destruktion and Levinas's concept of the Other.See Of Grammatology, p. 70, "I relate this concept of trace to what is at the center of the latest work of Emmanuel Levinas and his critique of ontology: relationship to the illeity as to the alterity of a past that never was and can never be lived in the originary or modified form of presence. Reconciled here to a Heideggerian intention,–as it is not in Levinas's thought–this notion signifies, sometimes beyond Heideggerian discourse, the undermining of an ontology which, in its innermost course, has determined the meaning of being as presence and the meaning of language as the full continuity of speech. ... This deconstruction of presence accomplishes itself through the deconstruction of consciousness, and therefore through the irreducible notion of the trace (Spur), as it appears in both Nietzschean and Freudian discourse."
Deconstruction as a strategy tries to find the most surprising contradictions in texts, unravel them, and build upon this; instead of finding the truth, the closure, or the steadfast meaning, it finds absence of presence, freeplay of meanings, etc. It is this absence of presence that is described as 'trace' by Derrida. However, he treats the word cautiously, and terms it thus only as a contingency measure, because the traditional meaning of the word 'trace' is a part of the scheme Derrida wants to uncloak.See Of Grammatology, p. 61, "The value of the transcendental arche [origin] must make its necessity felt before letting itself be erased. The concept of the arche-trace must comply with both the necessity and the erasure....The trace is not only the disappearance of origin,.....it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a non-origin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin. From then on, to wrench the concept of the trace from the classical scheme which would derive it from a presence or from an originary non-trace and which would make of it an empirical mark, one must indeed speak of an originary trace or arche-trace."
Différance
By the virtue of trace, signifiers always simultaneously differ and defer from the illusive signified. This is something Derrida calls "différance". According to Derrida, "Différance is the non-full, non-simple "origin"; it is the structured and differing origin of differences".Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: and other essays on Husserl′s theory of signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p.141. Further, language is labyrinthine, inter-woven and inter-related, and the threads of this labyrinth are the differences, traces. Along with "supplement", trace and différance convey a picture of what language is to Derrida. All these terms are part of his strategy; he wants to use trace to "indicate a way out of the closure imposed by the system...".Speech and Phenomena, p.141. Trace is, again, not presence but an empty simulation of it: The trace is not a presence but is rather the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself. The trace has, properly speaking, no place, for effacement belongs to the very structure of the trace. . . . In this way the metaphysical text is understood; it is still readable, and remains read.Speech and Phenomena, p.156. It is essentially an "antistructuralist gesture",Jacques Derrida, "Letter to A Japanese Friend," in Derrida and Différance, ed. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Warwick: Parousia), 1985, p. 2. as he felt that the "Structures were to be undone, decomposed, desedimented".Derrida and Différance, p. 2. Trace, or difference, is also pivotal in jeopardizing strict dichotomies: [I]t has been necessary to analyze, to set to work, within the text of the history of philosophy, as well as within the so-called literary text,..., certain marks, shall we say,... that by analogy (I underline) I have called undecidables, that is, unities of simulacrum, "false" verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition, resisting and disorganizing it, without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of speculative dialectics.Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 42-43. While the 'trace' cannot be indicated as linear or properly 'chronological' in any sense of the word, its resonance as a relay situates it as constitutive of temporality in a way prior to and conditional of historicity, as such: "It is because of différance that the movement of signification is possible only if each so-called 'present' element, each element appearing on the scene of presence, is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element, this trace being related no less to what is called the future than to what is called the past, and constituting what is called the present by means of this very relation to what it is not: what it absolutely is not, not even a past or a future as a modified present."Jacques Derrida, Différance, in Margins of Philosophy trans. Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), p. 13.