Writing at around the same time as Deleuze, Jacques Derrida represents another strand of poststructuralist thought that differs subtly, but importantly, from Deleuze’s, especially as it relates to the notion of the subject. Whereas Deleuze rejects the historical privileging of identity and, instead, aims to think difference-in-itself, Derrida undertakes a critique of Heidegger’s notion of the ontological difference to argue that what is more important is to think the difference – or as Derrida will call it for reasons to be explained, ‘différance’ – between difference and identity. However, while both Deleuze and Derrida emphasise pre-personal structures thought from difference/différance, Deleuze aims to abandon the notion of ‘the subject’ to analyse ‘singularities’, whereas I will show that Derrida aims to rethink the notion from différance; a position that accepts that ‘the subject/subjectivity’ will continue to play a key role in future Western thinking.

To do so, I first identify the basic coordinates of Derrida's notion of différance, as outlined in his 1968 essay of the same title, before demonstrating what it means for the subject. This is important because, as Caroline Williams notes, ‘the theorisation of the concept of the subject is central to deconstruction [and] has been a key component of Derrida’s thinking from the 1960s’. However, whereas many see Derrida as privileging différance in itself, with the consequence that they maintain that he aims simply to rethink the subject in terms of division, disruption and deferment, I argue that différance is what might be called a constellation concept for Derrida, in so far as it acts as the nexus that binds multiple tasks and heterogeneous perspectives to offer a particularly complex conception of a particular issue. Instead of simply thinking ‘the subject’ from différance, in 1983's ‘Geschlecht I: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference’, Derrida goes further by tying this relation to the question of sexuality also thought from différance. In so doing, he brings the question of sexuality firmly to the forefront of his rethinking of the subject and points to a political programme aimed at overcoming the logic of patriarchy.