Naturalising Deconstruction

Continental Philosophy Review, 2023

This article seeks to reconstruct and critically extend Jacques Derrida's critique of Edmund Husserl's transcendental phenomenology. Derrida's critique of Husserl is explored in three main areas: the phenomenology of language, the phenomenology of time, and the phenomenological constitution of ideal objects. In each case, Husserl's analysis is shown to rest upon a one-sided determination of truth in terms of presence-whether it be the presence of expressive meaning to consciousness, the self-presence of the temporal instant, or the complete presence of an ideal object through intuition. At every juncture, Derrida's reasoning is deployed in order to demonstrate how presence is irreducibly bound up with absence and otherness and thus how the ideal of a phenomenological self-presence of consciousness is itself an abstraction from the contingency of history and our concrete embeddedness within a particular lifeworld. The article concludes with an appraisal of reason's limits in a time of technological domination and the threat of global annihilation. Rather than a flight into irrationalism or skepticism, the author advocates a deepening of philosophical responsibility and an ethics of undecidability as essential for meeting the challenges of modernity.

In this paper I have examined Derrida's reception in the phenomenological field. I examined common miscontruals of Derrida as an empiricist and nihilist, and allegations that his post-phenomenology is a destruction of phenomenology. Contrary to these charges, I have argued that Derrida's post-phenomenology is a meta-phenomenology in its account for the conditions of possibility for transcendental-empirical distinction through his notions of differance and trace, as well as the quasi-transcendental. The quasi-transcendental is the interval between the transcendental and empirical which enables the thinking of both. Iterability and repetition name the conditions of possibility of ideality rather than being any simple destructive negation of it. The transcendental is only enabled by its signature, or difference from the origin in order to be communicated through space and time. It is the written mark, the quasi-transcendental, that which is neither transcendental nor empirical, which makes possible the distinction between the transcendental and empirical at the same time it makes impossible a sphere of purely expressive signs without the distinction. In this paper I review Derrida's reception in the field of phenomenology. This section differs from the review I gave earlier of phenomenologists in that it is a review of contemporary phenomenologists who have, unlike those covered previously, read Derrida, but read him erroneously, as I judge from my understanding of Derrida. I seek to address these misconceptions in this paper. Where contemporary phenomenologists describe Derrida's work as a disruption and interruption of phenomenology in critiquing the metaphysics of presence, I proceed to argue that characterizations of Derrida as a destructive critic of phenomenology are mistaken, and show how Derrida rather accounts for the conditions that make phenomenology possible with his notions of differance, iterability and the quasi-transcendental. Derrida is not to be mistaken for as a nihilist or an empiricist, rather he argues that phenomenology has to account for the conditions that make it possible. These conditions are differance, iterability, and the quasi-transcendental, that which is neither transcendental nor empirical, but the paradoxical space between that determines and enables us to think both transcendental and empirical. Derrida thus performs meta-phenomenology rather than a destruction of phenomenology as his critics

In this paper I have examined Derrida's reception in the phenomenological field. I examined common miscontruals of Derrida as an empiricist and nihilist, and allegations that his post-phenomenology is a destruction of phenomenology. Contrary to these charges, I have argued that Derrida's post-phenomenology is a meta-phenomenology in its account for the conditions of possibility for transcendental-empirical distinction through his notions of differance and trace, as well as the quasi-transcendental. The quasi-transcendental is the interval between the transcendental and empirical which enables the thinking of both. Iterability and repetition name the conditions of possibility of ideality rather than being any simple destructive negation of it. The transcendental is only enabled by its signature, or difference from the origin in order to be communicated through space and time. It is the written mark, the quasi-transcendental, that which is neither transcendental nor empirical, which makes possible the distinction between the transcendental and empirical at the same time it makes impossible a sphere of purely expressive signs without the distinction. The written mark functions as if it was transcendental, but without it no distinction between the transcendental or empirical would be able to take place, and were the distinction impossible no transcendental or pure expressive realm would take place either. Hence the phenomenological project becomes possible through this paradoxical relation of the quasi-transcendental, relating the transcendental and empirical in simultaneous identity and difference, identity in non-identity. It is thus made more powerful through an acknowledgement of the quasi-transcendental as its condition of possibility. In this paper I review Derrida's reception in the field of phenomenology. This section differs from the review I gave earlier of phenomenologists in that it is a review of contemporary phenomenologists who have, unlike those covered previously, read Derrida, but read him erroneously, as I judge from my understanding of Derrida. I seek to address these misconceptions in this paper. Where contemporary phenomenologists describe Derrida's work as a disruption and interruption of phenomenology in critiquing the metaphysics of presence, I proceed to argue that characterizations of Derrida as a destructive critic of phenomenology are mistaken, and show how Derrida rather accounts for the conditions that make phenomenology possible with his notions of differance, iterability and the quasi-transcendental. Derrida is not to be mistaken for as a nihilist or an empiricist, rather he argues that phenomenology has to account for the conditions that make it possible. These conditions are differance, iterability, and the quasi-transcendental, that which is neither transcendental nor empirical, but the paradoxical space between that determine and enables us to think both transcendental and empirical. Derrida thus performs meta-phenomenology rather than a

In this paper, we have examined various aporias that afflict phenomenology-Husserl's phenomenological reduction cannot hold if the transcendental is separate from the empirical, indeed, nothing separates the transcendental and the empirical and thus they are essentially the same. We demonstrated that Heidegger's repeated attempts to inverse to negate metaphysics only reproduced metaphysics as a ghostly double that returned to haunt his anti-metaphysics which remained bound to its ontological structure and vocabulary. We showed through readings of Levinas, Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty and Blanchot that their radical empiricisms and privilege of Other over the same repeated metaphysics like Heidegger, in negating it and reversing its structure, thus reproducing and affirming it paradoxically. In all these demonstrations we have shown that the impossibility of a text is precisely its site of possibility, deconstruction proceeds by exposing the limit of a text and then delimiting it towards the Other that it had repressed, its method is thus transgression and exceeding of limits imposed by a text towards its blindspots through exposing an aporia, and then proceeding to show the unthought of a text that needs to be thought in order to address this aporia.

In this survey of secondary sources on phenomenology I have located the problematic of an aporia that lies at its centre. Phenomenology has divided itself itself into transcendental idealism or empirical idealism and non-philosophy. In both these incarnations of phenomenology, Husserl's transcendental idealism and the radical empiricism in the philosophies of Heidegger, Levinas, Ricoeur, Blanchot and Merleau-Ponty, lies a form of theoretical essentialism and blindness to the meta-condition that structures phenomenology. It is differance, the space or interval between the transcendental and empirical which conditions and produces both the transcendental and empirical through the retrospective movement of the trace. Derrida's contribution to phenomenology, as I will argue in this paper, is his discovery of the quasi-transcendental, or the interval between the transcendental and empirical which determines phenomenology.

Ph.D Thesis -- University of Warwick. 1996 (submitted in October 1995)

"THE RULES OF THE GAME" -- Some of the principal themes of this Ph.D. thesis can be traced back to an early article that I presented at an international conference in philosophy held at Warwick University in 1989, entitled: “Différance Beyond Phenomenological Reduction (Epoché)?” – published in The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Vol.2, Issue 2, 1989. This paper explores the development of the various phases of the movement of epoché in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and its relevance for Jacques Derrida’s project of deconstruction. The analyses not only attend to the need for an effective propaedeutic to an understanding of phenomenology as method, they also serve to demystify the logics of Derridian non-teleological strategy by explaining the sense of such a manoeuvre -- as a kind of maieutic response to the Husserlian project – which operates within the horizon of a radical epoché. According to this orientation, Derrida’s deconstruction of phenomenology is permitted to open itself up to a phenomenology of deconstruction. The present book develops these analyses and utilizes a form of critique that points the way to the possibility of a phenomenological-deconstruction of the limits of Derrida’s project of deconstruction through the themes of epoché, play, dialogue, spacing and temporalization. In order to trace the resources from which he draws throughout the early development of deconstruction, this study confines itself to a discussion on the texts published between 1962 and 1968. This subjection of deconstruction to a historical de-sedimentation of its motivational, methodological, theoretical, and strategic moments, involves a certain kind of transformational return to the spacing between phenomenology and deconstruction, which urgently puts into question the alleged supercession of phenomenology by deconstruction. The expression of such a ‘beyond’ is already deeply sedimented in contemporary deconstructive writing to the point at which it is now rarely even noticed, let alone thematized and brought into question. This conviction (regarding the transgression of phenomenology by deconstruction) traces itself out in the form of an attitude to reading which is, in fact and in principle, counter to Derrida’s own call for care. The meaning and limits of the very terms, transgression, beyond, supercession, etc., must be continually subjected to deconstruction. The notions of play, dissemination and supplementarity – with the concomitant sense of transformational repetition that defines them – do not function as a mere excuse for lack of scholarly rigour. Deconstruction is a movement of critical return, which must insert itself (with a sense of irony) within the margins and intersections of that which gives itself up to this practice of textual unbuilding. The strategy of play encourages the structural matrix of that with which it is engaged to turn in upon itself, exposing its limits and fissures in a kind of textual analogue to a psychoanalysis. To be sure, this does involve a certain kind of violence – a violation of the ‘system’s’ own sense of propriety (what is proper [propre] and closest to itself) – but in no sense is this an anarchical celebration of pure destruction. We speak rather of irony, parody, satire, metaphor, double-reading and other tactical devices, which permit a reorganization of the deconstructed’s (textual analysand’s) self-relation and the possibility of playful speculation. Such play demands care and vigilance in regard to the appropriation of the logics of the system with which it is in a relation of negotiation. In order to play well, one must learn the game-rules."

Philosophy in Review, 2006

Husserl Studies, 1985

Derrida will argue that the reversal of the cogito and rethinking subjectivity in terms of embodiment and corporeality is a non-philsophy and anti-metaphysics that repeats metaphysics by negating and reversing it. Derrida's notion of truth is quasi-transcendental rather than anti-metaphysical like Merleau-Ponty's, which locates truth in the difference or differance between transcendental and empirical. Rather than privilege idealism or empiricism as both camps have done, Derrida posits the quasi-transcendental, differance, or the mediation between transcendental and empirical as the space of truth. Differance enables the thinking of both transcendental and empirical, and thus a thinking of the conditionality of structurality as differance is the true resolution to the impasse between idealism and post-metaphysics, or philosophy and non-philosophy.