Differance and Metaphor

Could I make a less Derridean claim than that differance is a metaphor for imaginative association? Differance, as the matrix-motion of the differences that falsify (would he even allow this) meaning, should never manifest itself in function or it has been misrepresented, should never appear lest it disappear (169).

My margin note at the line reads: What we note as differance will thus be the movement of play that "produces" these differences.

Then "for which circumstance and association are metaphors" and "movement of play" are circled.

What I had in mind is particularly an argument I made in some other essay that the three Fates should be counted among the daughters of Mnemosyne, or memory (those daughters being the nine Muses) because both mundane circumstance (the flow of trivia that constitutes experience) and imaginative association serve as metaphors for the tendency of memory to draw us continuously away from what would otherwise be accessible before us. Circumstance and association, that is, are metaphors for memory, which paradoxically disallows us the "presence" of the topoi both circumstance and association are continuously presenting to perception. I wrote the essay, but in truth my thoughts were muddled, and I suspect that what I meant to write is that all our engagements in perception are metaphors for metaphor itself, which denotes a simultaneous equalization and aberration.

My very modest reading of Derrida is haunted by the association I see between the athleticism in Harold Bloom's concept of poetic creation (from which I derive that all thought serves foremost, and often unbeknownst to the thinker, toward restoring the rapture of pure play, in a not necessarily Derridean sense) and the agonistic language Derrida employs in setting out: "everything is a matter of strategy and risk." I cannot, therefore, help but consider all pursuits as primarily aesthetic pursuits, primarily erotic games.

What beauty necessitates is uncanniness, a propos as well of differance, to the extent, as I worried, that it can necessitate. One seeks the most familiar thing, the most fitting, but maintaining a kernel of the uncalled-for. One seeks poetically what Derrida seeks in endeavoring to isolate the discrete push of aberration or difference, gelding it almost completely or manifesting it almost none. One seeks to delegate the least obtrusive almost, which is the most puissant. I have no better argument, but I think it is primarily a poetic gesture.