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meaning with knowledge and does not seem to believe in "absolute knowledge") cannot be found out or articulate by Western metaphysics because the texts get in the way. This is why difference in the texts is so crucial to understanding to understanding writing, the place of writing, meaning, deconstruction, and understanding in general.

The word differnce is defined somewhat within the text as referring to the act of postponing or deferring. It is important to note that according to Derrida, the differnce is not a word or a concept or even a thing, just as deconstruction is not a method or operation. It is a complicated concept, and Derrida outlined an excellent example as he attempted to explain the differnce to his reader. Rather than positing the differnce in terms of writing and/or speech, Derrida takes a different look at it by applying it to the body, or to the I-body. More specifically, he explores how the individual is at once the I and the Other, illustrating innate differnce within the individual body of the individual I.

In his essay on Antonin Artaud, Derrida focuses on the act of speaking and writes:
As soon as I am heard, as soon as I hear myself, the I who hears itself, who hears me, becomes the I who speaks and takes speech from the I who thinks that he speaks and is heard in his own name; and becomes the I who takes speech without ever cutting off the I who thinks that he speaks. (177-8)

There are two different I's within the I, according to Derrida. The I who speaks always finds that its words are stolen before he says them, before he thinks them. Derrida expands this idea and claims that the I's birth has been stolen from him, that the I has been stolen from the I by the Other and the Other is God. The origin is eluded as the subject vainly searches for something that is always already missing. In this act of furtive stealing, God inserts himself between "myself" and "myself" filling up an opening that we can then relate to the opening in speech that Derrida had discussed earlier.

In providing this example, Derrida makes it easier to understand the differnce in words in comparison to the differnce in the I. Derrida's differnce deals with how words and even theories are different from other words or theories, and that this difference gives them their meaning. It is the idea of a negative definition that at this point in the text seems typical of Derrida's style: it is the method of defining or ascribing meaning to something not by what it is but

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