I found the excerpt of Derrida’s essay, Differance, fascinating; not only for the level of complexity (I had to read it 3 times and I’m still struggling), but for the subversive ideas of reversing hierarchies that are entrenched in the history of thought within the metaphysical tradition.

His attempt of de-centering violent hierarchical binary oppositions, and his critique of the privilege given to one variable over another, such as presence/absence, good/evil, speech/writing, etc.  Specifically in this latter relation, Derrida demonstrates that contrary to the traditional approach of considering speech pure, more immediate to thought than writing as this latter as an obstruction to the process of portraying it, writing is a species of speech (Selden, Widdowson and Broker, 168). Both, speech and writing share the same structure of signifiers not always connected with signifieds, and are permeated by differance.

I wonder if the new opposition between metaphysics and deconstruction in the way we understand the world represents another hierarchical opposition that Derrida precisely tried to avoid.

I also found Johnson’s proposal of reading the silence very interesting (Rivkin and Ryan, 346-347) as an alternative to the usual way of reading texts. How we do that when we have social structures internalized (Foucault) that might prevent us from seeing the absence? Are there ways to escape, perhaps, looking at Lyotard and his skepticism toward the meta-narratives or Barthes with his idea of text that generates and subverts meaning? but again how to escape from fixed structures that shape our thought and enable ourselves to go beyond these limits?