Jakub Mácha (Bio)

LLMs as Différance Machines: Derrida, Searle, and the Problem of Propositional Unity

The aim of this paper is to scrutinize the account of language implicit in large language models through the lens of the Derrida–Searle debate. I argue that LLMs can be understood as Derridean différance machines, which helps explain both their fluency and their limitations. LLMs operate on iterable marks detached from originating contexts, speakers, and intentions. In this respect, they provide a striking technical realization of Derrida’s claim that citability, repeatability, and functioning in the absence of the sender are conditions of possibility of linguistic signs as such. LLM output shows with unusual clarity that signs can continue to signify without any present speaker intending them. Yet this Derridean framework is incomplete. If signs are understood primarily in terms of iterability, differential relation, and reinscription across contexts, it becomes difficult to explain what unifies them into an asserted proposition, judgement, or other speech act. In Platonic terms, the utterance lacks its “father”: the living source that could stand behind it and secure its force as assertion. Derrida shows why signs must function in the father’s absence, but does not provide a positive account of what, in that absence, unifies them propositionally. Searle’s reply attempted to preserve such unity by appealing to speaker intention. But in the case of LLMs that solution is unavailable: there is no speaker whose intention could unify the words into an assertion. I suggest, however, that an institutional-technical platform can partly substitute for the absent speaker by conferring an implicit illocutionary force on generated text. The platform frames outputs as answers, advice, summaries, or information, thereby endowing them with a quasi-speech-act status. LLMs therefore expose both the force and the limit of deconstruction. They confirm that language can function through iterable signs without an intending subject, while making visible what deconstruction