A Difference that Makes a Difference: Deconstruction between Energetics and Information

Even in his earliest writings, Derrida dealt with the problem of meaning, in particular how it was understood in structuralism and in Husserl’s phenomenology. For structuralism, meaning results from a differentiated combination of signs within a language, whereas for phenomenology it is the intuitive content of an otherwise empty sign. Derrida—drawing on Nietzschean and Freudian ideas and against the background of his discussion of Jacob in Life Death—introduces an energetic element (force) between these alternatives that allows meaning to be understood more as a vector. Building on these insights, this article attempts to link this conception of meaning to the contemporary debate between energetics and information, in which information (that which has meaning) is configured as the selection of forms against a differential energetic background or as a “difference that makes a difference.” The concept of différance is ultimately explained in these terms.