Seductions in Narrative: Subjectivity and Desire in the Works of ...

Hence, although meaning is effectively located within the linguistic correlation in constant deferral, Saussure fails to acknowledge plurality of meaning, changes in meaning, or even language games of the Humpty-Dumpty variety. It is with Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance that the idea that meaning is acquired through difference is thoroughly acknowledged. For Derrida, the space between signs within the linguistic chain is, in itself, a source of meaning:

From the suddenly jeopardised solidity of a reality exclusively constructed by language issues a related and equally adventurous notion. If language constructs reality, it also constructs our sense of ourselves; it may even construct, it could be argued, ‘ourselves’; hence Derrida’s reference to the subject in his formulation of différance above. Within such poststructuralist politics of language and subjectivity, whereby “[s]ubjectivity is produced in a whole range of discursive practices” and “[l] anguage constructs the individual’s subjectivity in ways which are socially specific” (Weedon 21), subjectivity becomes as imperilled a term as reality itself, where “the subject is constituted only in being divided from itself, in becoming space” (Derrida 29). Humpty Dumpty’s proposal, much to Alice’s chagrin, even much to our own chagrin, is not so far-fetched after all. The question, indeed, is which is to be Master (of words, of reality, of our selves).²