The opposite of mimesis, according to Plato. In diegesis the author speaks in their own voice, whereas in mimesis they do not (instead they try to create the illusion that it is someone else who speaks). In the 1960s, French structuralism scholars like Metz, Christian and Genette, GĂ©rard adapted it to refer to the actual succession of events in a story---i.e. what happens---which they opposed to the narration or telling of the story (effectively the new form of mimesis). This distinction found two particular uses in literary and film studies. First it allowed the separation of narrators who participate in the story which they are telling and those who do not---think of Conradâs Heart of Darkness (1900): Marlow participated in the action of the story he tells, so he is a diegetic narrator; but the person he tells the story to, who is in fact the one who reports to us as readers does not, therefore he is extra-diegetic, that is, outside of the story. Similarly, music in film can be either diegetic or extra-diegetic, part of the story being told, or an aural backdrop. diffĂ©rance French philosopher Derrida, Jacquesâs term---he explicitly rules out calling it a concept---for the condition of possibility for meaning. As he explains in the extremely helpful collection of interviews, Positions (1972), translated as Positions (1981), Derrida conceived this neologism in order to make apparent the way in which the French verb diffĂ©rer has both a temporal and a spatial dimension: on the one hand, it signals delay or reprieve (a deferred payment such as a pension, or a pre-recorded broadcast of a TV programme may both be referred to in this way); and on the other hand, it is the movement which separates like from unlike. To which Derrida adds a third observation to the effect that diffĂ©rance is the process which gives rise to the very differences it announces. As such, diffĂ©rance is an origin one never arrives at (its presence is permanently delayed), a difference one never fully succeeds in making, and the perpetual and necessary attempt to do both these things. The term is difficult to translate because the first of the three senses is not available in the English cognate âto differâ, making it hard for Anglophones to âhearâ its inner complexity. But if one bears in mind that it refers to a condition of possibility rather than a particular form of causality or even effect then its purpose can be understood relatively easily. In the interview already mentioned, Derrida goes on to discuss the notion of transgression in a way that illuminates quite helpfully what he is endeavouring to articulate with this notion of diffĂ©rance: transgression, he says, can never be achieved once and for all, because insofar as a law is transgressed it proves itself transgressible and by that measure the act itself ceases to be a transgression; so transgression must move ceaselessly to restore the integrity of the law it wishes to transgress. For this reason, as Lacan, Jacques and other psychoanalysis have pointed out, the supposedly arch-transgressor, namely the Marquis de Sade, is also of necessity an enthusiast of the law. Derridaâs reading strategy, which he calls deconstruction, assumes that diffĂ©rance underpins every aspect of meaning-making. Further Reading: S. Critchley The Ethics of Deconstruction (1992). J. Culler On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (1982). C. Norris Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (1982).