I
So far, no reading of Derrida has privileged, in a philosophical way, the concept of "experience." As far as I know, the attempt has not been yet made to raise the question of why Derrida uses the concept of "experience" so abundantly in his later works. In order to account for this fact, one has to explain how Derrida has renovated "an old metaphysical concept." Such an explication leads us to consider the problem of continuity and discontinuity in Derrida's philosophy through one of the least suspected terms in Derrida's thought. A full discussion of this problem falls outside of the boundaries of this paper, but I want to argue that throughout Derrida's philosophy we are witnessing a renovation of the concept of experience. As is well-known, in Of Grammatology and in Voice and Phenomenon, Derrida always characterises the traditional concept of experience in the philosophical tradition of the West as "the experience of presence," an absolute proximity to consciousness of that which is experienced. Derrida's characterisation of the traditional sense of experience as an experience of presence is not unquestionable for it is clear that we find different conceptions of experience in the philosophical tradition. What is the justification of the association of "experience" with "presence"? In fact, Derrida's characterization presupposes Heidegger's history of Being and the notion of presence that determines it. In Derrida's reading, Husserl's phenomenology has carried the traditional sense of experience as an experience of presence to its most explicit expression. I am not going to discuss whether this unification of presence and experience is justified or not by investigating different conceptions of experience. I intend to show that behind a unification of the traditional sense of experience in terms of the notion of "presence," Derrida has in fact explored the double logic of the concept of experience from the very beginning of his career. Although both Of Grammatology and Voice and Phenomenon assert that the concept of "experience" has traditionally denoted an "experience of presence," the very same works also suggest that working beyond the logic of presence and founding it, lies the buried logic of the trace.
It is clear from Derrida's early works such as Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl, Introduction to the Origin of Geometry, Voice and Phenomenon and the essay "Genesis and Structure and Phenomenology" in Writing and Difference that Husserl's phenomenology is Derrida's most immediate philosophical heritage. The phenomenological notion of experience provides us with the most significant background, though not the only one, to Derrida's own notion of experience. Although Derrida's main issue in these works only indirectly concerns the question of experience, it is obvious that his approach leads to a deconstruction and thus to a re-elaboration of the phenomenological concept of experience. "Experience" is a concept that Husserl was concerned with throughout his career. Derrida, in his reading of Husserl, in The Introduction to the Origin of Geometry and Voice and Phenomenon, concentrates on the logic that ties together the terms of "voice," "life" and "history" with the notion of "experience" understood as an "experience of presence." The close connection of life to experience becomes clear in the concept of "lived-experience [Erlebnis]. It is important to concentrate on the distinction between the concept of experience [Erfahrung] and lived-experience [Erlebnis], because this difference provides us with the best insight into the phenomenological notion of experience. Experience and Judgment makes clear that, in Husserl's philosophy, "experience" means primarily "active experience." Husserl understands "active experience" in terms of "explication." Explication is carried out by the "intentional analysis." The method of intentional analysis presupposes the pre-reflective thematization of the original flux in which the consciousness is affected by the singular. In other words, "active experience" presupposes a layer of "passive experience" in which the consciousness is called to vigilance by the appearing of the singular. Intentional analysis actively unfolds the phenomenal field; it actively explicates it. This is experience (Erfahrung) "in the primary sense." I argue that Derrida goes beyond a concept of experience understood in terms of "explication" through his analyses of the double logic of experience. To say that a deeper structure of experience underlies the phenomenological experience (which wants to be an experience of presence) implies already that Derrida goes beyond the conception of "experience" merely in terms of presence.
The concept of "life" is that on which Derrida concentrates – already in The Introduction to the Origin of Geometry, but more explicitly in Voice and Phenomenon – as the fundamental presupposition of Husserl's phenomenological concept of experience, whose conceptual implications remain hidden. As a way of dealing with the concept of life, Derrida thinks that we must deal with the metaphysical opposition of life and death and he shows how death serves the concept of "life" and is implicit in it. For him, the notion of presence appeals to the ideal of "pure life," without which Husserl's intuitionism would be without metaphysical support. Through the concept of "life" Derrida shows the way in which Husserl's phenomenology falls into the tradition of German idealism, although in the insistence on the irreality of the noema and in the analyses of the experience of time and of the Other Husserl opens a way to go beyond the conception of experience in terms of pure presence or pure life. Without a critique of the concept of life, the logic of the trace as the underlying logic of the phenomenological concept of experience would remain unintelligible. Derrida argues in Voice and Phenomenon that consciousness means for Husserl "the self-presence of the living, the Erleben of experience" (VP, p. 57). In this work one of his main concerns is the "enigma" of the concept of life in Husserl's expressions such as "transcendental life" and "living present." In the Introduction to the Origin of Geometry, Derrida had shown that the origin of an ideality can be nothing other than the possibility of the infinite repetition of a productive act. In Voice and Phenomenon, he argues that Husserl determined being as ideality, i.e., as repetition (VP, p. 53). An ideal form must secure the possibility of that repetition. Derrida emphasises that the ultimate form of all ideality, the form in which the infinite diversity of contents is produced, is the presence of the living present. Thus, for Husserl, the presence of the living present has a founding value. The self-presence of transcendental life, the possibility of overcoming the crisis, is ultimately grounded on this ultimate form. This form is secured by the "principles of all principles of phenomenology," i.e., the original self-giving evidence requires the presence of sense to a full and primordial intuition. This means that "The universal form of all experience (Erlebnis) and therefore of all life has always been and will always be the present. The present alone is and ever will be. Being is presence or the modification of presence" (VP, p. 53). This principle rests, in turn, on the analyses of time that take the living present, the now as the source point.
However, Derrida argues that the trace is phenomenologically more primordial than the present as a source point. It is inscribed "in the pure actuality of the now and constitutes it through the very movement différance it introduces" (VP, p.67). Given that the opening of the form of presence to the ideality implies the possibility of the infinite repetition of this form, a repetitive relation with infinity – a return ad infinitum – must already inhabit the finitude of retention. Therefore, repetition and re-presentation must belong to the very essence of experience. The experience of presence is an experience of trace.
Derrida argues that Husserl's attempt to secure presence or this ideal form requires that he take a traditional, metaphysical step, that of making signs "derivative." Signs are made "derivative," if they are conceived as a modification of presence. Hence, Husserl annuls representation, reproduction, and difference, when he applies distinctions such as "effective and fictive," "reality and representation," to language. No matter how I use words, that they can be "recognised" implies that I have entered into a system of language in which the ideality of signs presuppose an irreducible repetition and representation. Every sign is of an originally repetitive structure. When Husserl argues that in soliloquy, in pure expression, I do not communicate anything to myself, that I can only imagine that I am doing so, he wants to rule out the possibility that lived-experience which is supposed to be immediately present in the mode of certitude and absolute necessity may be divided by a manifestation of the self to the self through a representation of indicative signs. The identity of presence, in order to remain secure, must exclude any distance, alterity, difference, division. To justify the claim that in soliloquy communication is impossible, he makes use of the distinction between "real presence" and "presence in representation" and that calls for, according to Derrida, a deconstruction. Derrida's deconstruction locates itself at the intersection of the movement of temporalization and the movement of the constitution of intersubjectivity. He says, "At the heart of what ties together these two decisive moments of description we recognise an irreducible non-presence or nonself-belonging of the living present, an ineradicable nonprimordiality" (VP, p. 6). What resists the form of presence also shows that "living" is an effect of repetition, representation, difference. The ultimate conclusion that follows from Derrida's argument is that Husserl contradicts his own phenomenological reduction which was supposed to put out of play all constituted knowledge, for "an unperceived naïveté" is shown to constitute phenomenology from within (VP, p.5).
I suggest that the radicalisation of the notion of experience takes its departure from the invention of the notion of the "experience of trace"; one of the sources of the term is Levinas, besides Freud, Nietzsche and Heidegger. "Violence and Metaphysics," the first essay that Derrida wrote on Levinas in 1964 and revised in 1967, gives us the key terms for a debate on the term "experience." "Violence and Metaphysics" is enigmatic not only because it is "deconstruction in the making," but also because it seems, in a way, to repress the novelty of the concept of experience in its very invention. Just as the argument that "Violence and Metaphysics" is a deconstruction and the argument that it is not a deconstruction are both equally unconvincing, we can claim decisively neither that Derrida comes up with his new notion of experience in "Violence and Metaphysics" nor that nothing happens in "Violence and Metaphysics" insofar as the radicalisation of the concept of experience is concerned. There are hints of the double logic of experience - presence and trace - in "Violence and Metaphysics." In other words, it is no accident that Derrida places the term "experience" in "Violence and Metaphysics" at the crossing of philosophy which is originally Greek with its Judaic counterpart represented by Levinas' thought. I think that already in "Violence and Metaphysics" Derrida can be read as preparing the way for both an etymological return towards a more original Greek conception of experience which also intersects and communicates with the notion of "radical experience" as it is used by Levinas in Totality and Infinity. Thus, this essay is of crucial importance in explaining the movement, from Derrida's early works to his late works, in which "experience" acquires new characterisations and takes on senses which are not essentially Greek (such as the ethical connotations of experience and the messianic element).
Derrida's sources in his radicalisation of the notion of experience are heterogeneous. In order to explain the characteristics of "radical experience" in Derrida, one has to import concepts from Nietzsche, Bataille, and Blanchot. One has to take into account the tradition of "the impossible experience" in France.
II
In the post-Second World War period in France there is a dissatisfaction with both "experience" in the Kantian sense and "experience" in the Hegelian sense. The questioning of Kant's, Hegel's, and Husserl's notion of experience is implicit in Blanchot, Bataille, Levinas and Derrida. Kant's notion of experience accounts for the experience of natural phenomena and is insufficient to take care of historical and social experiences of individuals insofar as it implies "the subsumption of the singularities under the categories of understanding." Kant's notion of experience deploys a "program" and desires mastery over the experienced. Hegel's concept of experience in the sense of "undergoing experiences" better accounts for what consciousness lives through; nevertheless, the mastery over the experienced through the mediation of absolute knowledge which is both at the end and at the beginning of the phenomenology indicates the same sense of "program." Thus, in both Hegel and Kant, experience refers to the unimpeded Greek Odyssey, a journey in which it is possible to return to the point from which one started, a return to the self. As a reaction to the conception of experience as a "program," a different conception of "radical experience" can be detected in Bataille, Blanchot, Levinas, and Derrida. These thinkers contribute to a re-thinking of the notion of experience. In order to make sense of this "tradition," one must go back to Hegel's concept of experience and to the reception of Hegel's philosophy in France as much as to the influence of Nietzsche's thought on these thinkers. "Radical experience" implies a journey that passes the limits, a bodily traversal which opens the space and goes to the world risking catastrophe and death. Although it fundamentally implies iterability it is not capable of being transferred and implies the loss of the possibility of deterministic decision. Its radicality has been conceived in terms of its "impossibility." There is a sense in which the political significance of Derrida's "aporetic experience" is related to a politics of the impossible experience carried out in France by both Bataille and Blanchot. A limited discussion of this tradition is necessary for us to uncover fully Derrida's phenomenology of politics and why it develops around the notion of "the experience of the impossible."
As I have said, in order to set the stage for the radicalisation of the conception of experience, a historical digression through Hegel's reception in France is necessary. It is well-known that the lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit that Kojève gave in the 1930's brought about a discussion of the "end of history" in the French intellectual scene. According to Kojève, the realisation of the universal takes place in a secular eschatology. His rejection of the theological readings of The Phenomenology of Spirit implies that there is an unconscious anthropology implicit in such readings. For him, the end of history, the eschatological is thought without any appeal to transcendent, theological elements. Kojève argued that with Hegel's philosophy we are at the end of history. As Koyré notes, Hegel's philosophy of history can be possible only if the end of history has already taken place. Kojève discusses the end of history primarily from a methodological perspective: Hegel's discourse is intelligible if history has already ended; otherwise there is no unity but rather an unintelligible succession of the dramas of shapes of consciousness. We, the readers of The Phenomenology of Spirit, are at the end of history and there is no other history after history. The task for us at the end of history is to appropriate history already accomplished and understood by Hegel. To read The Phenomenology of Spirit over and over again ad infinitum is to take culture up and to take responsibility for it. This leads, for Kojève, to a planetary politics in a universal discourse. For those of us who want to question the order of the world, The Phenomenology of Spirit provides a criterion, because all success can only be evaluated and judged at the end of the completion of the act.
Bataille was present at Kojève's lectures. His book Inner Experience (1943) can be read as a rethinking of the implications and consequences of his reception of Kojève's interpretation of Hegel. Given that the resurrection as "human" is not possible at the end of history, Bataille raises the question: what happens to human desire at the end of history? For Bataille, eschatology in Kojève's interpretation of Hegel, does not even make "us", those at the end of history, tremble. The serenity of completely knowing ourselves inescapably reveals itself as ridiculous and boring. As soon as history is completed, there can be nothing new to which existence can amount. Existence becomes a boring repetition. Horror results if the death of man means the death of the negating action. If action is negativity, does one, who has nothing to do any more at the end of history, lose his negativity? Or, does useless negativity continue? Even if history justifies me at the end of history by verifying an idea of the world, my existence amounts not to a victory but to a failure. The failure is inescapable. "My life, the failure of my life as an open wound, as nothing but useless negativity, is alone sufficient to refute Hegel's system." Bataille's response here seems to draw from Jean Wahl's Unhappy Consciousness in Hegel's Philosophy, which Bataille had already read prior to Kojève's lectures. According to Jean Wahl's interpretation, The Phenomenology of Spirit can be read as the history of consciousness moving from unhappiness to happiness. Bataille seems to play Wahl's reading off against Kojève's when he is criticising Hegel for not taking into account the unhappiness or the restlessness that the completion of the history produces. Hegel has made use of the resources of unhappiness, i.e., the anxiety and restlessness, which have provided him with the resources of non-coincidence and non-closure on the possibility of which the progress of history depends. Hegel, however, excluded "unhappiness" from the end of history without any justification, despite the fact that "Hegel is not "gay" in absolute knowledge" (OC,V, p. 353). According to Bataille, Hegel's system intends to avoid anxiety and restlessness in order to obliterate "the impossible" that appears through anxiety. Let us note here that Bataille did not put into question the truth of Hegel's account of history and the fact that we are at the end of history. He is, however, in search of a way to criticise the system. He acknowledges that one cannot refute Hegel by means of logic. If history is complete, then one cannot even open the system to discussion. It seems that Bataille tries to find a way out of Hegel by interrogating Hegel's thought in Nietzschean terms.
Themes such as "risk," "forgetfulness," "catastrophe," "chance," "gambling," "play," "laughter," and the affirmation of the "unknowability of the future" (The Gay Science, § 287) appear as themes of a "radical experience" in contrast to experience in Hegel's sense. If, as Maurice Blanchot says, "the desire to go beyond the given is not a dialectical moment but transgression," such a transgression is not apolitical; it leads towards a "politics of the impossible." In fact, both Bataille and Blanchot have defined their position in relation to a "philosophy of the impossible"; "impossible" is taken here as that which is forgotten, that which cannot be expressed by philosophy. In 1962, Bataille took the impossible further into a "politics of the impossible." Bataille's impossible appears at the end of history in the form of laughter, ecstasy, mystery, etc.
In "From Restricted to General Economy," Derrida interprets Bataille's relation to Hegel by putting the concept of experience at the center of his reading. He thereby articulates the difference between Hegel's concept of experience and Bataille's as the difference between a restricted economy and a general economy. In fact, Bataille can be said to follow a certain trend of Hegel criticism which asserts that "experience" is inexhaustible. The movement of experience in Hegel is the movement of Aufhebung: each "determination is negated and conserved in another determination which reveals the truth of the former" (WD, p. 275). Experience in Hegel's sense reveals itself in the final analysis as the "continuous linking up of the meaning to itself," the work of the constitution of meaning in which nothing is lost or wasted. Bataille detects here the reduction of experience to the "world of work"; the fundamental assumption of the exhaustibility of experience in absolute knowledge represents for him the victory of the slave. "The Aufhebung is included within the circle of absolute knowledge, never exceeds its closure, never suspends the totality of discourse, work, meaning, law, etc." (WD, p. 275). According to Eroticism, the world of work is a world of prohibitions. Hence the movement of Aufhebung is nothing else than "the circulation of prohibitions, history as the truth of prohibitions." As Bataille argues in Eroticism, desire would be unthinkable without law and prohibition (OC, VIII, p. 20). Derrida seems to argue that precisely because Bataille's concept of experience is a transgression (the affirmation of play as a rule, the potlatch of signs, waste of words in the gay affirmation of death, i.e., sacrifice and challenge), it is unthinkable without a fundamental relation to Hegel's concept of experience and hence to a restricted economy. Experience is transgressive when it is a linking of "the world of meaning to the meaning of non-meaning" (WD, p. 275). This transgression of desire towards the non-meaning or the non-philosophical implies not only that the Aufhebung remains prisoner to the restricted economy. If the circularity of absolute knowledge serves for the circuit of reproductive consumption, "we" in absolute knowledge still belong to natural, servile and vulgar consciousness. Nature remains in "us" as a second tissue, a second nature. The attempt to transgress this second nature, culture, is described by Derrida as an attempt at an opening – "the mortal opening of an eye" (WD, p. 276).
Let us emphasize that Derrida underlines the fact that experience in Bataille's sense is not an experience of presence. He writes: "That which indicates itself as interior experience is not an experience, because it is related to no presence, to no plenitude, but only to the 'impossible' it undergoes in torture" (WD, p. 272). Furthermore, interior experience is not "interior." It is neither a return to immediate sense-certainty (in which an absolute presence is consumed) nor to any other type of certainty, for such an experience cannot enter the movement of mediation. Interior experience is named "interior" not because it has to do with an interior reserve of feelings, but because it opens to an exterior with which it has no relation except in the modes of "non-relation" such as that of rupture and sacrifice (WD p. 272). In fact, as Derrida's reading of Bataille clearly indicates, Bataille uses this term in order to break out of the closure of knowledge. Such an opening is possible through the "impossible," the "absolute non-knowledge." But, how do both of these terms mark the "mortal opening of an eye?" Derrida writes: "Unknowledge is, then, superhistorical, but only because it takes its responsibilities from the completion of history and from the closure of absolute knowledge, having first taken them seriously and having betrayed them by exceeding them or by simulating them in play. In this simulation, I conserve or anticipate the entirety of knowledge, I do not limit myself to a determined and abstract kind of knowledge or unknowledge, but I rather absolve myself of absolute knowledge, putting it back in its place as such, situating it and inscribing it within a space which it no longer dominates" (WD, pp. 269-70). According to Derrida, Bataille's impossible is not a transcendental signified but a lack of transcendental signified. If one had to employ another term in place of "impossible" here, that term might have been "exposure." What one exposes one's self to is not some sense carried by a transcendental signified. What is at stake here is the exposure to the opening of an infinite questioning. The possibility of the infinite questioning, or of the right to question of finite singularities lies in a sacrificial economy and logic. This is why only the singular's sovereign operation can leave the domain in which everything is taken as an occasion for a project, in order to lay down the impossible. As The Impossible points out, there can be no ground, no principles of such a task (OC, III, p. 510). Impossibility belongs to the Being that can neither stay within its limits nor evade them. If there is no point in discussing the "conditions" of the appearance of the impossible - since impossibility here exceeds logical impossibility - one could only describe the "experiences" of its appearances. Bataille argues that the impossible appears in sacrificing something useful, in murder, in poetry that defies reason, in the laughter that throws us to the open, in the ecstacy that precedes death and in the pleasure on the edge of destruction, in the joyful political action of those excluded from history (OC, V, 208, 209, 220, 213-214, 346, 355). But the impossible appears best of all in the interior experience of death which is laughable. For in that experience, the limits of the beyond are tested (OC, V, p.277, 479). Bataille thinks that such experiences are important politically and can be described in a politics of the impossible. Such a politics is not a politics of the project; it aims at leading to the paradoxical by means of experiences such as I have cited above. For example, laughter resists the project; since it cannot be dialectically sublated, it tends to go beyond the synthesis of the given possibilities. Laughter points to the unknowable, the unpredictable. It wants to obtain at the end of history the chance that subverts history.
Derrida argues that Hegel's work falls within the epoch of the phenomenological epoche carried out in the name of and in view of meaning. The sovereign operation conceived as a "reduction" is "not a reduction to the meaning but a reduction of meaning" (WD, p. 268). Non-meaning embraces the accidental retrieved from its assimilation into the necessity of the system. In its striving for homogeneity, Hegel's discourse, unjustifiedly though necessarily, reduces the accidental, heterological elements such as restlessness, eroticism, anxiety, laughter, and the mystical. Bataille insists on these experiences, since they do not constitute a dialectical moment in the Phenomenology. Hence, these resist the project (OC, II, p.323). But what does resistance to the project mean? According to Derrida, the attempts to stabilise the limit between philosophy and non-philosophy have always taken place through the concept of experience; and it is this attempt that determines its historical "specificity" within its dispersion throughout the tradition (WD, p.79). What Derrida says here is clearly the leading motivation in his reading of Bataille in "From Restricted to General Economy." The radical concept of experience, the experience of trace, becomes what it is in Derrida's work not simply because he makes an attempt to include what has so far been excluded from philosophy as "non-philosophical," but mainly because Derrida wants to underline the sacrificial logic underlying the inexhaustibility of experience. He shows in fact that the discourse of philosophy is sustained by a sacrificial logic. As Derrida's essay on Bataille makes clear, "experience" is not a term bound to a discourse that can be confined to a restricted economy, but exceeds it towards a general economy. In other words, the relation (or the non-relation) of rupture between these two different orders must be thought in terms of "experience." Perhaps, the elements of "radical experience" such as repetition, chance, play, risk, fear, untranslatability, resistance, forgetting, encounter of singularity, undecidability etc., must be conceived as the in-between of these two orders neither of which can be reduced to the other.
The extent to which Derrida can be said to carry out Bataille's legacy must be determined. These two thinkers are related in a "politics of the impossible" for several reasons. First, Derrida follows Bataille in the insistence that the politics of the impossible was the best way of discovering the politics of the possible (OC, III, p. 521). Rather than choosing among the given possibilities, one must invent other possibilities. In "Politics," Bataille writes: "There is a strange paradox; it is only when we become aware of a profound sense of the lack of a way out, and of the absence of goal and meaning that our mind is freed, and then we consciously engage practical problems" (OC, VI, Memorandum III, p. 251). Secondly, and more importantly, for Bataille, "the politics of the impossible" was never separated from the concept of "experience." Derrida makes this connection more explicit in his thinking of politics through the concept of "impossible experience." Common to both Bataille and Derrida in re-thinking "experience" is danger, adventure, war against agreement, reconciliation, concession, the deciphering of complicities between opposites, and hence a necessary violence involved in experience. These are the elements of a politics which at the last analysis must negotiate with what one cannot negotiate. Such a politics cannot aim at authority or claim to represent and speak in place of the Other or others or to choose the best of all the worst possibilities. In the interminable experience of deconstruction, however, this politics can hope to put the systems into question, remind us of the promise of the right to question that must belong to everybody. Risk is fundamental to such a deconstructive experience of the systems and deconstruction always risks consolidating the system and therefore risks its death in the danger of being integrated into the system. This notion of experience is crucial for politics because there is no morality that can answer to all the questions in a satisfying way; there is no morality that does not have a perverse effect. So, one must resort to "experience" when political questions concerning nationalism, racism, sexism, xenophobia, minorities, univocity, responsibility, Europe are at issue. Derrida claims that these issues exceed the order of the present and that of presentation. Such political questions cannot be dealt with in deconstruction without a conception of the experience of singularity – a uniqueness that cannot be translated into universality. Despite non-translatability, the singularity in question implies a plurality that escapes totalisation, an openness to reiteration, and an intrinsic relation to generality for it to be recognisable. Derrida's early work on Husserl only prepares the ground for a re-thinking of this notion of experience; it does not provide the notion of the experience of singularity on which the phenomenology of politics depends. Derrida discovers that radical experience is the experience of singularity in its ethical and political role through his encounters with Nietzsche's and Levinas' philosophy.
Thirdly, Derrida and Bataille acknowledge the complexity of a political strategy after Hegel's claim of the completion of history in absolute knowledge. In other words, the common mark of both Bataille's and Derrida's concept of radical experience is their anti-Hegelian and post-Hegelian character. There are significant differences, however, between Derrida's notion of experience and that of Bataille. In Inner Experience, Bataille tells us that inner experience is not action, for action is dependent on the project. Nevertheless, for Bataille "inner experience" is to leave the sphere of the project, by means of a project (OC, V, p.73). This is precisely why such an experience is difficult and even impossible. In Derrida, however, radical experience insofar as it is aporetic does not project but endures the paradox, waiting to give a chance to the solution that comes from the other. In other words, Derrida's concept of experience relates to the concept of alterity in more complicated ways. One way to bring Bataille closer to Derrida is to interpret "impossibility" in terms of "undecidability." We should be aware of the fact that Bataille was criticised for pacifism just as Derrida is being criticised today. For example, tracing the development of Bataille's thought, Richir points to the loss of desire for action, and attributes this to the paralysing effect of Kojève on Bataille. Nevertheless, I wonder whether this criticism is justified, because in both Bataille and Derrida the politics of the impossible expresses, on the one hand, a rebellion against that which has a claim to completion, transparency, and necessity and, on the other, a refusal to wait for worldly accidents that can save us in passive patience. Derrida thinks that the waiting implied in the aporia is not passive patience but resistance. And here too, the proximity between Bataille and Derrida is obvious.
Within the tradition that radicalises and renovates the concept of experience, Derrida's position can be qualified yet in another way: Experience is a "passage beyond the limits" or a "transgression", though the unlimited affirmation here (or the double affirmation of the singularity) cannot be opposed to law. Derrida emphasises this connection to law while reading Blanchot in the "Law of Genre." Law might be perceived as an interdictory limit or a binding obligation that obliterates the singular, though the birth of law or of the limit is not unrelated to the process of double affirmation. Implied here is the fact that one must not simply take experience as a passage; experience implies at the same time a "non-passage." If one fails to keep "passage" and "non-passage" together in the new concept of experience, one cannot escape from falling into empiricism. The "impossible experience" understood in that sense leads us to the concept of "aporia" and I think we enter thereby into an aporetico-political phenomenology. Deconstruction defined as an "impossible experience" can make sense only in this context, as a politics of resistance and of novelty opposing itself to the program and the project. In its "programmatic thinking," philosophy has forgotten its essential sense, the impossible, or experience in the primary sense. Derrida proceeds to develop his notion of experience as an "undecidable experience," as that of an "aporia." He radicalises the question of experience to such an extent that he raises the question: "Is experience possible that is not an experience of aporia?"
III
In order to discuss the structure of experience, we must first look at the way Derrida understands the notion of the "structure." Then some features of experience can be singled out. As we can infer from Derrida's essay "Genesis and Structure," the traditional concept of structure presupposes the simultaneity of parts to the whole. The structure is conceived synchronically, implying "fixity" or "permanence." In general, the notion of structure is conceived as opposed to the concept of "genesis" or development of parts that takes place through time (thus in a diachronic way). Both in "Genesis and Structure" and in "Structure, Sign and Play," Derrida emphasises (against the structuralists) that the structurality of the structure implies an opening. In "Genesis and Structure" he says that "the opening of the structure is structural," i.e., essential (WD, p.155). Thus, the structure of experience is open. If we turn to "Structure, Sign and Play," Derrida explains that "structure" has been determined fundamentally as a "fixity" through a reduction or neutralisation of the structurality of structure, "by a process of giving it a center or of referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin" (WD, p. 278). He does not claim that there can be a structure without a center, given the fact that the function of the center is to organise the structure and to limit the play within the structure and that there can be no unorganised structure; the structure must have a center. The question concerns rather the sense in which the structure "has" the center. What is the status of this "having"?
The center is that which limits the play within the structure by closing it off and also what makes it possible by opening it up. "As center it is the point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no longer possible." The fact that permutation is forbidden at least in the center makes the center escape from "structurality." Hence the center is both inside and outside the structure; its relation to it is one of "participation without belonging." The very principle that organises and decides about the belonging of the elements to the structure is itself "contradictorily coherent" and undecidable. Thus the structure must always already be an open one; and the opening of the structure right through its center (in the blink of an eye) necessarily participates in the sense of the "structurality of the structure." Derrida claims that the center or the "arche," the "telos" etc., cannot be conceived on the basis of a full presence beyond play, that is, beyond substitutions, repetitions, permutations, transformations. Play is inscribed in its very interdiction. Or, repetition, re-iteration, permutation, that is, madness, forgetting, the unthematizable play of the trace resides at the origin of the structure of experience which the tradition wanted to question in terms of its laws (conditions of possibility) alone. Thus by re-thinking the status of "center," carrying the consequences of the traditional conception to their limits, Derrida establishes that the trace is both the condition of possibility and of impossibility of experience. Here, the double logic of experience comes to sight and this can indeed be described as Derrida's "principal theme". The history of Western philosophy is characterised by the determination of Being as presence in all senses of this word: "It can be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated an invariable presence – eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia, (essence, existence, substance, subject) aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man and so forth" (WD, p. 280). The deciphering of the structurality of the structure, however, brings forth another logic of the sign in the absence of a transcendental signified. Thus the experience of presence is in fact at the same time an experience of trace. Experience is possible as the impossible. At the source of this discovery lies the "Nietzschean critique of metaphysics that is the critique of the concepts of Being and truth, for which were substituted the concepts of play, interpretation, and sign (sign without present truth); the Freudian critique of self-presence, that is the critique of consciousness, of the subject, of self-identity and of self-proximity or self-possession; and more radically, the Heideggerian destruction of metaphysics, of onto-theology, the determination of Being as presence" (WD, p. 280).
If, then, with Nietzsche and Bataille Derrida characterises the structurality of the structure of experience in terms of "play," the specific sense in which he understands the notion of "play" is crucial. According to Derrida, there is a tension between play and the linear conception of history. Play is not identical to mere indefinite progression or repetition; it is a different sort of repetition and so it remains always in tension with the notion of "presence." The pre-ontological status of "play" is best given by the statement that play must be conceived before the alternative of presence and absence on the basis of which Being is defined. In a sense, this is already implicit in Heidegger, for he speaks of the play of concealment and unconcealment of Being. The fact that play comes to the fore as an essential characteristic of experience makes experience inexhaustible, incomplete, infinite, without a linear destination. As experience, play undermines the linearity of the project and originally interrupts the possibility of the structural closure. Let us remember that "play" for Bataille opened Hegel's system to question. In The Guilty, written between 1939-1943, Bataille argues that one has to gamble with Hegel. We already find the echoes of Bataille's voice in Derrida when he argues that absolute knowledge wants to abolish chance, whereas gambling frees us from the teleology that necessarily ties the future to the past. For both Derrida and Bataille, chance is what the philosopher – Hegel – cannot take into account. To accept it is to defy philosophy. Although the element of chance and gambling belongs to the way "experience" is used in natural language, philosophy turned "experience" into a program, thereby overlooking the unpredictability of the consequences of what we are going through. Here, unpredictability does not imply a total loss of possible anticipations but implies a limit of the capacity to determine the outcome. Chance does not imply chaos, although it makes contingency and indeterminacy essential. Dice are thrown for the "beyond" of Being: for that which is not yet. Gambling appears to be play with the future, it involves risk.
In a general way, such an analysis of the structure of experience echoes in the etymology of the term "experience." "Experience" implies the concepts of "pera" (beyond), "peras" (limit), "poros" (passage). Hence, the concept of limit cannot be separated from the original sense of "experience." What interests Derrida in "experience" is primarily the passage beyond the limit, for "experience" primarily designates a voyage that passes the limit, a traversal that opens to the world and goes toward the Other and the others. Such a concept of experience cannot be considered apart from the question of the identity of the subject and the object of experience. Experience is not an issue of intact identities. At least in experiences constitutive of one's identity, one has to do with the other as one's self and also with one's self as other. However, Derrida claims more than that: the possibility of the experience of the other always already implies a non-self-coincidence, or a de-fection of identity of the subject of experience. The radical sense of experience implies not only that one will not know in advance how one would be transformed by that experience, but also that prior experiences have always transformed one so that one is open to a new experience. Experience in that sense fails translation and transfer; it cannot be conveyed or taught. When the original Greek sense of "experience" is interpreted in terms of the model of an Odyssey, the voyage implies a return to the same, to the starting point. Derrida's notion of experience exceeds its Greek model if that model is understood in terms of the appropriation and the assimilation of alterity through its representation. Derrida's thought comes out of the tradition of the same, but it is a thought of alterity like that of Levinas. Thus, in order to block the assimilation of an alterity in experience, Derrida appeals to the claim that "experience must, at the same time, be conceived as non-passage." To conceive experience both as "passage" and as "non-passage" leads Derrida to the notion of "aporia." As far as I know, Levinas did not make use of this fundamentally Greek philosophical conception in order to describe what he calls radical experience, namely, the experience of the face of the Other. Aporia or the "non-passage" blocks every type of hermeneutical circle, the structure of understanding and interpretation that appropriates the other. The object of radical experience is irreducible to an object of understanding. Only if we take experience in the sense of the passage beyond the limit, as an experience of an aporia, only then do we catch a glimpse of experience in the radical sense. Derrida generalises and carries what he says here to its extreme, when he claims that in fact there is no experience in the genuine sense which is not an experience of the aporia. Genuine experience is an experience of impossibility or an impossible experience.
Aporia means heteronomy and implies "undecidability." In an aporia, however, what we have is not a paradox constituted by a double universality. Rather, we have contradicting demands made by universality and a singularity. In fact, in the more recent works, the question of aporetic experience becomes the question of the justice in experience. Derrida's references to Levinas in "The Force of Law" and his interpretation of the fundamental aporia in Levinas' thought between the Other and the third becomes central precisely at the point where the question of experience intersects with the question of justice and of responsibility in experience. Derrida's aporias imply always universality and a singularity and hence a double bind. And insofar as one is responsible towards the singular Other in experience, the figure of experience exceeds being that of an Odyssey; rather one has to keep in view the opposite figure of Abraham who leaves his own country without any hope of return. Thus, although Derrida's re-thinking of the concept of experience is essentially Greek, it exceeds its origin by an attempt to include the infinite responsibility for the singular Other, in the promise of experience.
Experience fundamentally implies risk. One has to take the risk to experience. Carrying out an assuring or an assured program, a voyage planned in advance, an organised experimentation is not experience in the primary sense. This is the reason why Derrida prefers to use "experience" rather than "trajectory", "way" or "parcours"; these terms still allude to a journey planned in advance, i.e., to the derivative sense of "experience". Like Hegel, Derrida uses the term experience in the sense of "undergoing an experience." He rejects the idea, however, that "experience" is a return to the self. If "we" already know or can anticipate the moments of the experience of consciousness with itself, if the absolute knowledge is both at the beginning and at the end of "experience," then Hegel's experience is not "experience" in Derrida's sense. Like Bataille, Derrida emphasises that experience has a fundamental right to the unpredictable (disaster). The risk involved in "experience" is a risk that cannot be calculated; it includes "the errancy from which there is no return." Let us remember that "risk" is essential to Hegel's master-slave dialectic. The master becomes master because he risks his life. Bataille thinks that this is the moment in which we find an anticipation of the possibility of the non-teleological in Hegel. In contrast to the slave, the master does not tie himself to action; he is the negativity which has no use. But Hegel does not pursue this idea any further. "Absolute risk" means at the limit, the risk of death. Risk is absolute if it cannot be calculated, if it is unpresentable. Yet, Derrida agrees with Hegel that something like this is the chance of the event and the condition of history. If one does not take an absolute risk, then one is not "experiencing anything." Rather, one is deploying a program, i.e., one is subsuming the singularities under a rule or a norm. If the loss of the subject in the absolute risk is the condition of experience, then the death of the subject is inscribed in experience.
Taking the element of risk seriously, experience can no longer be described solely as a work of reason understood in a classical manner in its effort do decide. Reason in experience is receptivity and there is no moment in which it is exempt from hesitation and fear. In the radical experience, the reason must risk madness, that is, it must become mad, live again what is always already inscribed in its origin. Madness, however, is not the sole risk insofar as experience is primarily a bodily exposure. If experience means "passage" and "non-passage" at the same time, it is not sufficient to say that the body prepares the way, opens the space to traverse at its own risk. One must also add that the body risks being stuck or lost in the zone that it has violated. Experience can be a wandering in which there is no return. Even if the body survives the experience, it will carry the traces of its lived experience of its having taken the risk of death. All of this can be taken as implicit in what Derrida says of "writing." Experience is always writing, both spatialisation and temporalization; it risks in order to make invention and novelty possible. Although writing too is a technique, it exceeds technique in the sense of project and program.
According to Derrida, experience does not solely risk violence to the same but also to the Other. If experience is an experience of the breaking out of a closure, it takes the risk of violence which is the condition of possibility of saying, communication, dialogue. Here it is possible to see Nietzsche's influence on Derrida. According to Nietzsche, language involves violence in speaking, writing and listening. Derrida agrees with Nietzsche that language should become violent in order to be creative. For him, the dream of absolute proximity of self-presence conceals the originary violence of language. Violence is constitutive of experience not only because it is linguistic but also because it implies a traversal towards the Other and the others. Nothing prevents the possibility that one can harm or destroy the others in an experience; nothing prevents the possibility of harm to the subject to the point of its loss. As soon as we find ourselves in the intersubjective realm, violence is inescapable – if we want to escape from a greater violence, namely "silence." The violence involved is best illustrated by the fundamental aporia between I, the Other and the third. The Other commands unconditional giving but the third puts my privileging the Other into question by demanding equality. This means that justice in experience cannot escape from risking violence.
Finally, if one does not take the risk of undergoing the paradoxes and the impossibilities which are the conditions of experiencing the novelty, one falls into the greatest danger in politics: the danger of a technique of politics, the danger of adopting a program of decision. One must resist this tendency that the unmasterable rhythm of political time imposes on us. Derrida designates "deconstruction" as the "experience of the impossible" not so much because he privileges the aporetic thread of deconstruction but because he opposes both "experience" and "deconstruction" to the "program". His ethics and politics is mainly a resistance to the program and the project. His political philosophy is a re-evaluation of the possibility of the experience of novelty and of resistance. In this respect one can claim that "experience" is an even more important term than "deconstruction" and should perhaps replace it.
Experience as a trace structure implies an opening. This opening is inconceivable without "repetition," a return of that which is repressed and a forgetting of the forgetting. The feeling of fear belongs to this structure as well as danger, chance, risk, gambling, etc. One has to feel fear, if one is not able to project or anticipate the future coming, if the arrival risks being destructive, if one does not know what or who is to come, when and where. The logic at work here can only be explained by the work of mourning, by a logic of the "beyond" that underlies and sustains the logic of the presence. In Specters of Marx , Derrida writes (repeating in a sense what he wrote in The Post Card ): "(i) the phenomenal form of the world is spectral; (ii) the phenomenological ego (Me, You, and so forth) is a specter. The phainestai itself (before its determination as phenomenon or phantasm, thus as phantom) is the very possibility of the specter, it brings death, it gives death, it works at mourning" (SM, p. 135). In a footnote to what he has said here Derrida suggests, despite the fact that he does not want to contest that "a phenomenology of the specter ought, according to good Husserlian logic, to isolate a very determinate and relatively derived field within a regional discipline (for example a phenomenology of the image and so forth), that all spectrality should be sought in the noema which is an intentional but non-real component of the phenomenological lived experience. Insofar as this non-real inclusion of the noematic correlate is neither "in" the world nor "in" consciousness, spectrality is no longer "regional" for it is the condition of any experience, any objectivity, any phenomenality" (SM, p. 189). The point here relates to a declaration made in the last pages of Specters of Marx, namely, that the open structure of experience must be thought of as "messianic." Although this observation goes along with the return of the religious into the political, as the return of what has been repressed since modernity, the point goes beyond a "political observation." Only if, however, one could really secure the limit between theological messianism and an a-theological messianism or if one could separate the two messianic spaces, only then would one be able to claim that the messianic structure of experience is a-theological. Then, insofar as the adjective "messianic" designates here the open structure of experience, it can only be called "a quasi-transcendental messianism":
If the messianic appeal belongs properly to a universal structure, to that irreducible movement of the historical opening to the future, therefore to experience itself and to its language (expectation, promise, commitment to the event of what is coming, imminence, urgency, demand for salvation and for justice beyond law, pledge given to the other inasmuch as he or she is not present, presently present or living, and so forth), how is one to think it with the figures of Abrahamic messianism? Does it figure abstract desertification or originary condition? Was not Abrahamic messianism but an exemplary prefiguration, the pre-name [prénom] given against the background of the possibility that we are attempting here? But why then keep the name or at least the adjective (we prefer to say messianic rather than messianism, so as to designate a structure of experience rather than a religion), there where no figure of the arrivant, even as he or she is heralded, should be pre-determined, prefigured, or even pre-named? Of these two deserts, which one, first of all, will have signalled the other? Can one conceive an atheological heritage of the messianic? (SM, pp. 167-168).
The question of the messianic structure of experience can be further interpreted within Derrida's discussion of experience as hospitality. I think that it can be explored from within Derrida's relation to Levinas' thought. In order to reveal the ethical and political implications of Derrida's use of the term "experience," I believe that the double logic of experience must be rethought through the double logic of hospitality.
1 Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1976) and in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, tr. David B. Allison (Evanston: NorthWestern University Press, 1973). I refer to this work as Voice and Phenomenon. Hereafter VP.
2 Jacques Derrida, Le Probleme de la Génèse dans la Philosophie de Husserl (Paris: PUF 1990). Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction tr. John P. Leavey, (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). Writing and Difference tr. Alan Bass, (Chicagoo: The University of Chicago Press 1978). Hereafter WD.
3 Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, tr. James S Churchill and Karl Ameriks, (Evanston: NorthWestern University Press, 1973 p. 79.
4 For Derrida's reading of trace in Heidegger see "Différance," Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie, 63 (1968) ; "Différance" in Voice and Phenomenon, pp-154-156; "Ousia and Gramme", in Margins of Philosophy, footnote 6 and pp. 66-67. For the reading of trace in Freud see, "Freud and the Scene of Writing" (1966) in Writing and Difference, pp. 196-231. Derrida's further allusions to Freud are in Glas (1974); "Le facteur de la vérité" (1975) Poétique 21 and in La Carte Postale; Pas (GrammaBE, 1976); Fors (in Le Verbier del' homme aux loups, de Nicholas Abraham et Maria Torok, 1976); Epérons (1972-78); La Vérité en Peinture (1978). Other writings on Freud, "Spéculer Sur Freud" in La Carte Postale and lastly "Etre juste avec Freud" in Résistances (1996). For the reading of trace in Nietzsche see and also "Interpreting Signatures (Nietzsche/Heidegger): Two Questions," (French version first published in Révue Internationale de Philosophie, vol. 10, no. 2, 1986) in Dialogue and Deconstruction. The Gadamer–Derrida Encounter (1989). For the reading of trace in Levinas see "Violence and Metaphysics," in Writing and Difference and "En ce Moment même," (1974) in Psyché.
5 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, tr. by. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).
6 Perhaps, one must situate the dissatisfaction to an earlier date, by taking Walter Benjamin's interest in the concept of experience seriously. Benjamin, when writing on Baudleaire, in Passages, discovers that in dream experiences and in those experiences brought about by narcotic drugs, a "world made up of secret relations reveals itself." In this world of experiences, the objects might be found to be in contradictory relations with each other, to be in an indefinite intimacy. The "I" communicates with them in a corporeal way. Benjamin talks about this communication in terms of "mimesis." At the foundation of experience lies the capacity to produce and perceive resemblances. That capacity develops historically and increasingly becomes the apperception of non-sensical similarities. To some extent, Benjamin follows a re-thinking of the limits of experience that the surrealists have pursued. Although the connection between the Surrealist concern with experience and a serious reading of Freud and psychanalysis is doubtful, there are hints that already a new concept of experience is coming about in the late 19th centrury and the early 20th, in order to break with Kantian conditions of experience. Perhaps, like the Romantics, Benjamin must be described as being in search of a new conception of experience which can embrace all the "plenitude" of the ancient conception of experience.
7 According to Vincent Descombes, in Le Même et l'Autre Quarante–cinq ans de philosophie française (1933-1978) (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979) pp-14-21 sq. Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl dominated the French intellectual scene from the 1930's to the 1960's. Prior to 1930's Hegel was for the most part dismissed. On the one hand, Leon Brunschvicg, a dominant figure in the academic scene, was arguing from a neo-Kantian perspective that Hegel's philosophy of nature was outdated and refuted by scientific progress. On the other hand, Bergson was contributing to the misunderstanding of Hegel's philosophy. Koyré's essay "The State of Hegel Studies in France" (1930) was already signaling a return of Hegel. Kojève lectured in Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE) until 1939, creating a wide enthusiasm and interest around Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. (For the details of this history, see Jean Michel Besnier La Politique de l 'impossible, L 'intellectuel entre révolte et engagement, Paris: Editions La Découverte, 1988.) As it is well-known, Kojève was not only reviving Hegel but also was conceiving Hegel's phenomenology in relation to some Heideggerian motifs such as "anxiety" and "being towards death" and in relation to some Marxist themes such as "labor" and "class struggle." Kojève offered an anthropological interpretation of the system. Although Hegel rejects a myth of the natural state in The Philosophy of Right (§ 187), Kojève based his reading on man's experience of the passage from Nature to History. According to Kojeve, man is distinguished from animal by desire (Begierde). Natural man is not distinct from animal: like animals, he is dependent on nature because of his natural needs. However, an animal remains an animal. Man, on the other hand, is the being that he is not yet. This is to say, man can negate his natural being in order to become what he can be, i.e., history. Desire is the key of history. Truly human is the desire directed to the other's desire; the desire for recognition. I shall not follow Kojève's interpretation any further, for it is well-known that he privileges the master-slave dialectic in order to show how it plays out the dialectic of desire through history towards universal recognition.
8 A. Kojève, "Hegel, Marx et le Christianisme," Critique, no: 3-4, 1946, pp. 365-366.
9 See A. Koyré, "Hegel à Iena," Etudes d'histoire de la pensée philosophique (Paris: Gallimard 1971) pp-147-189.
10 Georges Bataille, L'expérience Interieure, in uvres Complètes, Vol. V, pp. 9-181. Inner Experience, tr., Leslie Boldt (Albany: The SUNY Press, 1988). Hereafter I shall refer to uvres Complètes as OC.
11 J.M. Besnier cites Bataille's letter to Kojève, 6 December 1937, (OC,V,p. 369-371) in La Politique de l'impossible in chapter 4, "La fin de l 'histoire."
12 Jean Wahl, La conscience malheureuse dans la philosophie de Hegel, (Paris: 1929)
13 Blanchot defines transgression as "le dépassement de la limite indépassable." The possibility of such an experience presupposes a failure of the mastery over one's self, that is, the primacy of the ego, the logic of identity. Therefore, Blanchot says that the transgression is the experience of that which evades power, the experience of the "impossible" itself. (" la transgression est l'expérience de ce qui échappe au pouvoir, l'impossible même."); Maurice Blanchot, "Le rire des Dieux," in Amitié, (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 201.
14 See Bataille's letter to Jérôme Lindon dated 31 Janvier 1962, (OC, III, p. 520). There, Bataille says that the impossible (as it is presented in his book) is primarily, "sexuality." It was Sade who described the essential form of impossibility in sexuality. (He adds that Blanchot also writes about this when he writes on Sade). The second figure of the impossible is indicated as "the literature." But, Bataille here complicates the list by returning to the beginning: "Mais avant tout, la philosophie est le sens de l 'impossible, mais que la philosophie dans la mesure où elle est impossible cesse d 'avoir quoi que ce soit de commun avec la philosophie formelle qui domine" (Ibid, p. 521). Hence the primary and the ultimate sense of the impossible is to be found in philosophy – a philosophy that shares nothing with the formal philosophy. According to Bataille, the impossible in this sense is expressed by himself and Blanchot as the "philosophy of the impossible."
15 The project is the prison of discursive existence from which Bataille wants to escape. And he forms the project of escaping from the project by breaking the discourse in him. For example, ecstasy betrays the discourse by taking away the issue from it. (OC,V, p.73) He also says that to put an experience in a project is an inevitable disease of experience. On the one hand, the project must be maintained and on the other hand, experience is the contrary of project and I can reach to live an experience only when I go against my project (OC,V, p.69).
16 Marc Richir, "La fin de l'Histoire," Textures, 1970, no: 6, pp. 31-47.
Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed., Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 247.
17 Jacques Derrida, Aporias tr. Thomas Dutoit (California: Stanford University Press 1993), p.15.
18 Jacques Derrida, "'Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology," in Writing and Difference, pp. 154-168.
19 Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play," in Writing and Difference, pp. 278-293.
20 Georges Bataille, Le Coupable in OC, V, pp. 235-392.
21 Jacques Derrida, "Rhétorique de la drogue," Points de Suspension, p. 255.
22 In La Communité Inavouable (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1983), Blanchot says that, although such experiences fail transfer, nothing prevents in Bataille's approach the possibility that such experiences can be shared.
23 Jacques Derrida, "Il n 'y a pas le narcissisme" in Points de Suspension: Entretiens, (Paris: Galilée 1992), p. 221.
24 Original violence is distinguished from empirical violence understood as the violation of law, of the contract with the third party. However, the constitution of law also involves violence. In "Admiration of Nelson Mandela: The Laws of Reflection," Derrida distinguishes between "constitutive violence" (which can also be called "force" following Nietzsche) and "excessive violence." (See also Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority', tr. M. Quaintance. Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. Drucilla Cornell. Et.al. (eds) (New York: Routledge 1992) pp. 14-15. Law can be deconstructed because it has been constructed and deconstruction that makes use of force is prescribed, in order to avoid greater, excessive violence which, as we know from "Violence and Metaphysics" can take the form of silence.)
25 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of mourning and the New International, tr. by Peggy Kamuf (Newyork and London: Routlegde 1994). Hereafter SM.
26 I have in mind here the first pages pp-278-79 of "Spéculer sur Freud" in La Carte Postale de Socrate a Freud et au-dela (Paris: Flammarion 1980).