« dès qu’il y a, il y a différance »
J. Derrida, La carte postale
Within the wide landscape of post-Husserlian phenomenology, Derrida occupies an ambiguous position since he always underlined, on the one hand, the belonging of phenomenology to the so-called metaphysics of presence, and, on the other hand, he always stressed the phenomenological transgressions of metaphysics. Despite these ambiguities, I claim Derrida should be considered part of the transcendental current of philosophy, inaugurated by Kant and then carried on in different ways by Husserl and Heidegger. By transcendental tradition I mean a tradition whose main philosophical question regards the conditions of givenness of experience.
In my presentation, I will argue that Derrida’s grammatological project far from being a mere investigation of language, is rather a thorough phenomenological inquiry into the conditions of manifestation of the world and their limits. Firstly, I will present how Derrida approaches the question of transcendentality, which is faced by testing its limits. Indeed, Derrida carries out a meta-reflection on the transcendental, investigating its genesis and asking for the ultra-transcendental conditions of possibility of transcendental itself. Secondly, I will show how Derrida deepens the Husserlian and Heideggerian inquiries on the horizontality of the world by the ‘concept’ of trace and by questioning the very movement of formation of the form, that is, the movement of constitution of the world. Paradoxically, the trace is ‘something’ that covers the entire field of entities but, at the same time, is the differential movement that, devoid of any positivity, forbids their full presence.
Finally, I will conclude that, for these reasons, the world, and experience in general, has to be read as a complex fabric of traces, that is, as a text. Such textuality of experience means that everything is ab origine marked by absence and empiricality and is tantamount to claim that what makes presence possible is precisely what makes it impossible.