A word’s identity requires repeatable difference with a trace of sameness

Evidence

If meaning is not simply that abstract realm we gain access to in dictionaries, how is it that words nevertheless do mean? It can be argued, Derrida shows, that what is most essential about words, for them to work as words, is that they are repeatable. A sign that was unique even in this sense, that happened only once, would not be a sign. So even when we insist on something’s identity as ‘the same word’, it is in fact something reiterated on different occasions, in different contexts. The simplest identity of a word, its self-sameness in this sense, is formed out of differences, the difference of reiteration. This reiteration has something paradoxical about it. On the one hand, each occurrence of a word is different. The word may differ in time or place, and may be modified in a diversity of empirical characteristics – being written, for example, instead of spoken. Language depends on the possibility of such diverse and different repetitions of the word, just as it depends upon the differences between words; it occurs only as such differing repetition. On the other hand, what is reiterated must remain the same word. In the midst of different repetitions, through every modification, there must remain a trace of something recognisably the same. It is this trace of sameness that we experience as the word’s ‘meaning’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 458

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains iterability: words work by differing repetition, with meaning experienced as the trace of sameness.
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that identity is constituted by difference-with-sameness is dense and repays long reflection, though it is standard Derridean material rather than paradigm-shifting in itself.
• XREF: connects to: Identity is always impure because repetition identifies by altering — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 723; Repetition necessarily alters what it repeats — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 721; Iterability names the process by which repetition both enables and corrupts identity — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 721