différance a French coinage deployed by Derrida in De la Grammatologie (1967), where he defines it as ‘an economic concept designating the production of differing/deferring.’ Différance is polysemic, but its key function is to name the prime condition for the functioning of all language and thought: differing, the differentiation of signs from each other that allows us to differentiate things from each other. Deferring is the process by which signs refer to each other, thus constituting the self-reference essential to language, without ever capturing the being or presence that is the transcendent entity toward which it is aimed. Without the concepts or idealities generated by the iteration of signs, we could never identify a dog as a dog, could not perceive a dog (or any other thing) as such. Perception presupposes language, which, in turn, presupposes the ideality generated by the repetition of signs. Thus there can be no perceptual origin for language; language depends upon an ‘original repetition,’ a deliberate oxymoron that Derrida employs to signal the impossibility of conceiving an origin of language from within the linguistic framework in which we find ourselves. Différance is the condition for language, and language is the condition for experience: whatever meaning we may find in the world is attributed to the differing/ deferring play of signifiers. The notion of différance and the correlative thesis that meaning is language-dependent have been appropriated by radical thinkers in the attempt to demonstrate that political inequalities are grounded in nothing other than the conventions of sign systems governing differing cultures. See also DECONSTRUCTION , DERRIDA, PER- CEPTION , POSTMODER. M.C.D.