Jacques Derrida calls différance a difference that does not belong to the system of identity-difference. The différance is not the negative that helps a positive to a mediation with itself. The thinking of différance is neither negative nor dialectical, nor speculative. It refers to a game that withdraws from the dialectical work of negation in every respect. The différance opens up in the first place the room for play of conceptual work and the binary oppositions which organize it. It opens it up by withdrawing from it, by not being able itself to correspond to the rules of the game which it has opened, for its own game, the game of différance, corresponds to irregularity itself. With it reference is made “to an order that resists the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible that is fundamental for philosophy. … The concept of game keeps itself beyond this opposition; it announces in the night-watch before philosophy and beyond it the unity of contingency and necessity in a calculus without end”. Différance withdraws, it refuses, it resists the metaphysics of presence. It is a kind of irreducible, i.e. resistant, non-presence, abyss of any presence which itself is conceivable neither as presence nor as a present absence. The game of this abyss which we, along with Heraclitus, Nietzsche and Heidegger, call the game of the world, is called by Derrida the game of différance. The différance opens up the room for play of that which Heidegger calls Western metaphysics and Derrida the history of logocentrism. From the beyond of occidental onto-theology, the game of différance controls the productivity, the differentiations, the identifications, the taxonomies and typologies of a tradition oriented toward the model of presence with its concept of living presence (ousía). It is the ‘origin’ of metaphysics, ‘origin’ of the logos which itself is nothing but the origin of the metaphysical movement of thought. Différance can therefore no longer be called origin. It is the “non-full, non-simple origin of differences. Consequently, the name ‘origin’ can no longer be applied to it”. The thinking of différance must be thought as the thinking of the ‘origin’ of the origin. It points into the abyss of logocentrism; it opens thinking to a space beyond the logos, beyond ratio, certitudo, self-consciousness insofar as the latter imagines itself as pure self-affection. It is a thinking that refuses to decide between the alternatives of uncertainty (expectation, hope) and certainty (calculation, calculus), between opening and closure, by holding open the gap (the difference) between these options. It decides in favour of the conflict between all the metaphysical options that depend on the model of presence/absence: activity/passivity, culture/nature, subject/object, etc., that is, in favour of the conflict which Heidegger addresses as the primal conflict between aletheia and lethe or, as Derrida also calls différance, in favour of primal violence, arche-violence.