Derrida basic

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy의 내용을 전문 지식이 없는 사람이 해석한 내용입니다.

---

Basic Argumentation and its Implications:
Time, HearingOneself-Speak, the Secret, and Sovereignty

The basic argumentation always attempts to show that no one is able to separate irreplaceable singularity and machine-like repeatability (or “iterability,” as Derrida frequently says) into two substances that stand outside of one another; nor is anyone able to reduce one to the other so that we would have one pure substance (with attributes or modifications).

Machine-like repeatability and irreplaceable singularity, for Derrida, are like two forces that attract one another across a limit that is indeterminate and divisible.

 

Yet, to understand the basic argumentation, we must be, as Derrida himself says in Rogues, “responsible guardians of the heritage of transcendental idealism” (Rogues, p. 134; see also Limited Inc, p. 93). Kant had of course opened up the possibility of this way of philosophizing: arguing back (Kant called this arguing back a “deduction”) from the givenness of experience to the conditions that are necessarily required for the way experience is given. These conditions would function as a foundation for all experience.

Following Kant (but also Husserl and Heidegger), Derrida then is always interested in necessary and foundational conditions of experience. 경험의 기저 측면

 

So, let us start with the simplest argument that we can formulate. If we reflect on experience in general, what we cannot deny is that experience is conditioned by time. 우리의 경험으로부터 떼어낼 수 있는게 있다면, 바로 시간이다. 

Every experience, necessarily, takes place in the present.

In the present experience, there is the kernel or point of the now.

What is happening right now is a kind of event, different from every other now I have ever experienced.

Yet, also in the present, I remember the recent past and I anticipate what is about to happen.

The memory and the anticipation consist in repeatability. 기억과 예기는 반복성에 기인한다.

Because what I experience now can be immediately recalled, it is repeatable and that repeatability therefore motivates me to anticipate the same thing happening again.

Therefore, what is happening right now is also not different from every other now I have ever experienced. At the same time, the present experience is an event and it is not an event because it is repeatable.

This “at the same time” is the crux of the matter for Derrida.

The conclusion is that we can have no experience that does not essentially and inseparably contain these two agencies of event and repeatability.

---

This basic argument contains four important implications.

First, experience as the experience of the present is never a simple experience of something present over and against me, right before my eyes as in an intuition

there is always another agency there.

Repeatability contains what has passed away and is no longer present and what is about to come and is not yet present.

The present therefore is always complicated by non-presence.

Derrida calls this minimal repeatability found in every experience “the trace.”

Indeed, the trace is a kind of protolinguisticality (Derrida also calls it “arche-writing”), since language in its most minimal determination consists in repeatable forms.

 

Second, the argument has disturbed the traditional structure of transcendental philosophy, which consists in a linear relation between foundational conditions and founded experience.

In traditional transcendental philosophy (as in Kant for example), an empirical event such as what is happening right now is supposed to be derivative from or founded upon conditions which are not empirical.

Yet, Derrida’s basic argument demonstrates that the empirical event is a non-separable part of the structural or foundational conditions. 

칸트와 같은 전통 철학에서는 경험적 사건이 경험적이지 않은 무언가로부터 유도되거나 만들어진다고 생각했지만, 데리다의 기본 논거는 경험적인 사건은 구조적으로, 혹은 근본적으로 구별될 수 없는 기본 단위라고 주장했다.

Or, in traditional transcendental philosophy, the empirical event is supposed to be an accident that overcomes an essential structure.

But with Derrida’s argument, we see that this accident cannot be removed or eliminated.

We can describe this second implication in still another way.

In traditional philosophy we always speak of a kind of first principle or origin and that origin is always conceived as self-identical (again something like a Garden of Eden principle).

Yet, here we see that the origin is immediately divided, as if the “fall” into division, accidents, and empirical events has always already taken place.

In Of Spirit, Derrida calls this kind of origin “origin-heterogeneous”: the origin is heterogeneous immediately (Of Spirit, pp. 107–108).

 

Third, if the origin is always heterogeneous, then nothing is ever given as such in certainty.

Whatever is given is given as other than itself, as already past or as still to come.

What becomes foundational therefore in Derrida is this “as”: origin as the heterogeneous “as.”

The “as” means that there is no knowledge as such, there is no truth as such, there is no perception, no intuition of anything as such.

Faith, perjury, and language are already there in the origin.

 

Fourth, if something like a fall has always already taken place, has taken place essentially or necessarily, then every experience contains an aspect of lateness.

It seems as though I am always late for the origin since it seems to have always already disappeared.

Every experience then is always not quite on time or, as Derrida quotes Hamlet, time is “out of joint.”

Late in his career, Derrida will call this time being out of joint “anachronism” (see for instance On the Name, p. 94).

모든 경험은 시간 밖에 있다. 이를 데리다는 시대(시간?)착오적라고 명명한다.

As we shall see in a moment, anachronism for Derrida is the flip side of what he calls “spacing” (espacement); space is out of place.

But we should also keep in mind, as we move forward that the phrase “out of joint” alludes to justice: being out of joint, time is necessarily unjust or violent.

그러나, 우리는 이 사실을 기억해야한다.
Being out of joint할 때, 시간은 필연적으로 폭력적이며 비정의스럽다.