Meaning emerges from the paradoxical combination of sameness and difference in repetition.

Evidence

Meaning arises, then, because the word is always a repetition, in a double sense. It is a repetition in the sense of something non-original, something that occurs by modifying or differing from an other; and a repetition in the sense of the-same-again. Meaning is an effect of this paradoxical quality of sameness and difference, whereby a word always happens to be just the same only different. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 459

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the Derridean paradox of repetition: meaning arises only because a word is both non-original (‘differs from an other’) and ‘the-same-again.’
• XREF: connects to: Repetition necessarily alters what it repeats — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 721