RP 36_f5_45-62 11/13/06 11:56 AM Page 45

DERRIDA AND THE QUESTION OF PRESENCE

by

FRANOISE DASTUR
Universit de Nice -Sophia Antipolis

ABSTRACT
It has often been considered that the most important part of Derridas work consisted
in the five books published between 1967 and 1972. This paper intends, by way of a
re-reading of Derridas most powerful text from this period, Speech and Phenomena, to
bring to light Derridas specific manner of uniting the question of the disruption of
presence to the question of writing. What is therefore questioned is Derridas empha-
sis on death, considered as the very condition of possibility of language and writing.
As Derrida rightfully shows, Husserl, in spite of the importance he conferred upon
writing in the process of idealization, was not aware of the fact that the relationship
to death constitutes the concrete structure of the living present. But on the other hand,
by still opposing in a too dualistic manner presence and absence, life and death, Derrida
himself was not able to see that the condition of language is not so much the death
of the subject as the being toward death and the finitude of Dasein.

Derrida was a prolific writer. His work extended over a period of

exactly fifty years if we include his first essay on Husserl, which was
written in 1954, though published only many years later.1 Thus the
attempt to give an encompassing view of his work remains difficult,
in spite of a remarkable thematic unitya unity that is all the more
surprising to find in the author of La dissmination, that is, in an author
who never ceased to criticize in an acute manner the very idea of
reassembling. In spite of all the commentaries that have been given
in France as well as elsewhere of many aspects of Derrida work, it
seems to me that what constitutes its very core still needs to be questioned
instead of beingas was often the caseeither violently despised and
rejected or emphatically praised and admired. In his last interview,
published in the French Newspaper Le Monde on August 19, 2004,
Derrida himself raised the issue of the survival of his work and considered
two hypotheses in which, he said, he simultaneously believed: he had
the feeling, on the one hand, that his work has not yet been read and
that a long time will be required for that and, on the other hand, that

Research in Phenomenology, 36
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands 2006
RP 36_f5_45-62 11/13/06 11:56 AM Page 46

46

a few days after his death nothing may remain of it.2 Derridas writing
can indeed be seen as an extension of himself, as his real corps propre,
so that it makes sense in a way to believe that it could completely
disappear once he is dead, with the exception, as he says, of the legal
deposit of his books in the librairies, which is nothing else than the
dead body, the corpse of the writer; indeed Derrida considered him-
self a writer as much as, and maybe even more than, a philosopher.
But what could remain or, better, reappear in a somewhat spectral
manner after a long time could be the absolute singularity of the question
he asked to the entire Western tradition of thought. What I would
like to do in the following could be considered as being only a
preparation for such a reappearing, a preparation that proceeds by
trying to point to Derridas specific manner of uniting the philosophical
to the literary, namely, the question of the disruption of presence in
the question of writing.

It has often been considered that the most important part of his work
consisted in the five books published between 1967 and 1972, the
period during which Derrida suddenly became famous. In a way, he
became even more famous in the United States than in France following
the lecture he gave in 1966 in Baltimore on La structure, le signe et
le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines.3 It is true that during
the years following the publication in 1962 of his introduction to
Husserls Origin of Geometry, Derrida developed in an amazingly short
period of time what we could consider the foundation of what later
came to be called deconstruction. In the sole year 1967, Derrida
published not only Lcriture et la diffrence, a collection of articles written
between 1959 and 1966, but also the two parts of De la grammatologie,
which had been written in 1965 and 1966, and the famous essay
La voix et le phnomne, which was probably written during the same
period and which was immediately followed by two other smaller essays:
La diffrance, a lecture given to the Socit Franaise de Philosophie
on January 27, 1968,4 and Ousia et Gramm, a text published in
1968 in a collective work dedicated to Jean Beaufret,5 who had been
teaching in the Ecole Normale during the years when Derrida was
studying there. I myself arrived in Paris at the end of 1961, and like
many other students of philosophy who followed Derridas teaching in
the Sorbonne, I began under his guidance an intensive reading of
Husserl and Heidegger, which finally led me two years later to leave
Paris for Freiburg im Breisgau. As a result, I was not able to observe
RP 36_f5_45-62 11/13/06 11:56 AM Page 47

47

the incredibly powerful development of Derridas work in the following

years. I would like now to try reconstituting his path of thinking in this
period when he developed at the same time a deconstruction of what
he called metaphysics of presence and a new conception of writing.
I have already dedicated a text to Derridas reading of Husserl6 in
which I try to retrace schematically the steps of his interpretation
of Husserlian phenomenology from 1954 to 1967. Earlier I wrote
another text on the problem of the relationship between Heidegger
and Derrida around the question of difference.7 I want now only to
insist upon the two main themes of thought that Derrida found in
Husserl and that constitute the basis of his project of deconstruction
of logocentrism and phonocentrism. The first one is to be found in
The Origin of Geometry, where Husserl, after having affirmed the inde-
pendence of the ideal objectivity in regard to its linguistic expression,
shows by a sudden reversal that not only linguistic incarnation but
writing itself is the indispensable medium of the constitution of truth
and of ideal objects.8 Writing had always been considered as what
gives some permanence to what is said, and in the same manner
Husserl sees in it what confers upon idealities a perpetual being. But,
as Derrida emphasizes, such a perpetual being, which has nothing to
do with an actual infinity, is only the pure form of infinite iteration,9
so that the opening to infinity that takes place in human history under
the form of geometry, i.e., philosophywhich is nothing else for Husserl
than the theoretical capacity of neutralizing facticity10 is not the
opening to an ahistorical realm of eternal entities but, on the contrary,
is the opening of what Derrida callsusing an expression found in
one of Husserls manuscriptsa transcendental history,11 the para-
doxical history of that which remains identical and can be infinitely
repeated.
Husserls sudden reversal constitutes the main interest of this short
manuscript, as Merleau-Ponty first emphasized in his 195960 lecture
course;12 but for Merleau-Ponty, if there is here a decisive gesture,13
it still takes place inside language, insofar as the apparition of writing
is nothing else than an essential mutation of language,14 whereas
Derrida will later consider the same gesture as a basis for his inver-
sion of the relationship between speech and writing. But this will imply
a break with Husserl as well as with phenomenology, for, as Derrida
will stress later in his essay on La voix et le phnomne, writing is still for
Husserl a modus of speaking, which means that he remains emprisoned
in the traditional phonocentrism of metaphysics; insofar as writing
RP 36_f5_45-62 11/13/06 11:56 AM Page 48

48

is for him exclusively phonetical writing, it allows at any time the

reactivation of speech in writing, the reawakening of expression in
indication.15
This brings us to the second theme in Husserls phenomenology
that serves to direct Derrida toward a grammatology, i.e, the analysis
of soliloquy carried out in Husserls First Logical Investigation. To this
analysis Derrida dedicated his famous 1967 essayan essay which, in
spite of all the commentaries on it, has perhaps not yet really been
read, i.e., questioned. But even as a quite original work it has to be
situated in a specific context, since Derrida was always very open to
outside influences. It must therefore be recalled that this period, which
witnessed the development of structuralism in France, was marked by
philosophical interest in linguistics and especially in Saussures Cours de
linguistique gnrale, first published in 1916 but rediscovered by Lvi-
Strauss, Merleau-Ponty, and Barthes during the fifties. This explains
why the problem of the sign is also the object of Derridas inquiry in
1966. His inquiry goes in two different directions: in a philosophical
one, with Speech and Phenomena, whose subtitle is precisely: Introduction
to the Problem of Sign in Husserls Phenomenology, and in a scientific
and anthropological one, with the first part of De la Grammatologie, which
is the development of an essay dedicated to three books dealing with
the historical problem of the origin of writing.16 Because of the lim-
ited space of this paper, I shall give preference to the philosophical
and phenomenological direction of Derridas inquiry.
In Speech and Phenomena, Derrida tries to explain something very
curious: on the one hand, Husserl constantly maintained that ideal
objects can be found only in statements and even that writingand
not merely speechwas required for their constitution; on the other
hand, he maintained in his First Logical Investigation that in soliloquy,
in inward speech, we make use, not of any factual langage, insofar as
we are not situated in the space of indication and communication, but
of pure expression, expression meaning here immediate proximity to
the full presence of the signified. In soliloquy, I do not speak to
myself as I do when speaking with others; I indicate nothing to myself
because there is no need of it; and this uselessness of inward com-
munication is, as Derrida says, the non-alterity, the non-difference in
the identity of presence as self-presence.17
But we cannot of course find in the thinker of the living present
the idea of a simple self-identity of the present identified with the
now; and as Derrida explains, the presence of the perceived present
RP 36_f5_45-62 11/13/06 11:56 AM Page 49

49

is continuously compounded with a non-presence and non-perception,

i.e., with retention and protention.18 This means therefore that there
is indeed an alterity in the self-identity of the subject, which is
the very condition of presence and presentation, since only a non-
instantaneous consciousness can be consciousness of something other
than itself. It is possible to agree with Derrida when he says that this
relation to non-presence in the living present destroys any possibility
of a simple self-identity, but this does not mean that there is no
difference between retention and representation, primary memory and
secondary memory, and that the representational character of sign and
indication can already be found in the self-relation of the subject.
There is indeed an abyss that separates retention and representa-
tion, since in order to represent something, consciousness must already
be constituted; yet this is possible only on the basis of retention, which
as the repetition of the immediate past is something essentially different
from representation.
As Merleau-Ponty shows in his analysis of the Husserlian concept
of time consciousness, there are no discrete instants that are succes-
sively in beingas we could imagine in view of Husserls diagram
of timebut they differentiate themselves from each other so that
there is not a multiplicity of linked phenomena, but one single
phenomenon of running-off.19 In other words, the mystery of time
lies precisely in its essential continuity, which has to be thought as a
process of differentiation, as a bursting, a disintegration, a general
flight out of the Itself, or as Heidegger says, an ek-stase. Therefore
it does not seem possible to lookas Derrida doesfor the common
root of retention and representation in the possibility of repetition
in its most general form, that is the trace in the most universal sense.20
The word trace appears here without explanation, but in De la
Grammatologie, where the word is frequently used and constitutes the
central concept, Derrida indicates that the choice of this word has
been imposed on him by some contemporary discourses; the first
contemporary to be mentioned, before Nietzsche and Freud, and by
far the most important, is Levinas.21 It is true that Derrida indicates
that this notion is taken here, beyond Levinas, in reference to a
Heideggerian intention and is used to unsettle what he calls the meta-
physics of presence. Nevertheless the Levinasian meaning of trace
remains the basis of the Derridian notion of trace, which is defined
as being marked by the relation to the other, 22 and as retaining
the other as other in the same, as does retention.23
RP 36_f5_45-62 11/13/06 11:56 AM Page 50

50

In opposition to Merleau-Ponty, who shows how Husserl tranforms

the line of time into a network of intentionalities 24 and makes a
clear distinction between the identifying syntheses required by explicit
memory and the transition-synthesis that constitutes retention as
such,25 Derrida considers that the Husserlian dialectic of protention
and retention only complicates the structure of time while conserving
its fundamental homogeneity and successivity, so that Husserl continues
to abide by a linear model of time.26 In the chapter of Phenomenology
of Perception dedicated to temporality, Merleau-Ponty tries to unite,
perhaps in a too rapid manner, Husserls and Heideggers conceptions
of time, by emphazing the fact that there is no need of a synthesis
externally binding together the tempora into a single time.27 Derrida
would rather oppose them and, at least in De la grammatologie, identifies
the linear conception of time that in his view still commands Husserls
phenomenology of internal time-consciousness with the Heideggerian
vulgar concept of time.28 It is in fact quite possible to think that
Husserls analysis of temporality on the basis of the musical experience
is only an artificial reconstruction of the temporal experience or,
as Grard Granel says, an ontic model of ontological truth.29 But
what has to be questioned in Husserls analysis is not his thesis of the
fundamental continuity of time but rather the fact that he is trying to
give a representation of what withdraws itself in an essential manner:
the transition itself that is time. Husserl was fully aware of the fact
that in order to describe temporality names are lacking, so that only
metaphors, that is to say, ontic models, can be used here.30
The question is now: Is it possible, as Derrida would like, to consider
retention and reproduction as two modifications of non perception31
without presupposing a general discontinuity of time? When Husserl says
that retention is perception and explicit memory representation, i.e.,
a secondary presentation of the past, he wants to make clear that there
is a fusion of past and present in retention that does not allow any
distance between them. As he explains, retention is not representation,
because it is a process that belongs to a more original kind of intentionality
than the representative and objective one, a fungierende Intentionalitt,
an operative intentionality that operates lengthwise and is the basis
of consciousness itself.32 Such an intentionality is conscious in the
sense that it belongs to consciousness, but it is not objective. This is
the reason why Husserl declares that retention of a content of which
we are not conscious is impossible: because each content is origi-
nally conscious (urbewusst) in itself, it would be senseless to suppose
RP 36_f5_45-62 11/13/06 11:56 AM Page 51

51

that it becomes conscious only later.33 Derrida quotes this passage in

order to show that phenomenology rejects the after-event of the
becoming conscious of an unconscious content that is the structure
of temporality implied throughout Freuds texts.34 The name of Freud
appears here in a sudden manner, but in a footnote Derrida refers to
his text Freud et la scne de lcriture, first published in 1966 in
the review Tel Quel and reprinted in 1967 in Lcriture et la diffrence.
There, in order to explain the Freudian Nachtrglichkeit, Derrida makes
use of the concept of originary delay (retard originaire) about which
he recalls in a footnote that this concept was imposed on him in
his reading of Husserls Origin of Geometry.35
If we go back now to the 1962 introduction, we can find in the
last pages, where the theme of difference appears in an explicit manner,
the following statement: Delay is the destiny of Thought itself
as Discourseonly a phenomenology can say this and make philosophy
equal to it.36 Derrida declared here that the structure of delay becomes
thematized in phenomenology only, since reduction, the method
of phenomenology, needs as its starting point the constituted result it
neutralizes.37 Derrida found in Husserl himself the idea of a com-
plication of the originary: that the originary meaning can only be
deciphered in a retroactive way in the final product of a historical
development.38 Derrida acknowledged therefore that there is an authen-
ticity of the phenomenological delay and concluded that the reduction
is only the pure thought of this delay, pure thought as far as it becomes
aware of itself as delay in a philosophy,39 a philosophy that is nothing
else but the repetition in the discourse of the originary.
What happened between 1962 and 1967 that led Derrida to regard
phenomenology as unable to think the originary delay and as included,
therefore, in the metaphysics of presence? It cannot be only the
reading of Freud and the acknowledgment of psychoanalysis as a sci-
ence that, like linguistics, is no longer dominated by the questions of
a transcendental phenomenology or a fundamental ontology,40 a
psychoanalysis that can be considered as having archontic meaning
insofar as it deals with the constitution and value of objects in a non-
theoretical and formal manner.41 For Derrida has never accepted the
dogmas of the Freudian metapsychology42 and has always questioned
the very notion of the unconscious, without however leaving it
completely aside, trying rather to understand it in a non-metaphysical
manner. As he explained in La diffrance, Freud gave the name of
unconscious to an alterity that can never be presented as such and
RP 36_f5_45-62 11/13/06 11:56 AM Page 52

52

that is considered a virtual or masked consciousness, so that the

metaphysical discourse of phenomenology is inadequate to describe this
radical alterity in relation to all possible modes of presence. 43
Phenomenology is a metaphysical discourse because it understands the
temporal process as unity and continuity, whereas with the alterity of
the unconscious we have to do with a past that has never been
present,44 an expression that is explicitely borrowed from Levinas,
who in The Trace of the Other explains that the face of the other
is an immemorial past, an absolute past that unites all times.45
As Derrida recalls in a text dedicated to Ricur in 2004, it was
on the occasion of a visit in Ricurs house in 1961 that he first heard
about Levinas doctoral thesis, which was about to be defended. Ricur,
who was a member of the committee, spoke about it with enthusiasm.
This is the reason why, as soon as Totality and Infinity was published,
Derrida immediately started to read it.46 In his (quite critical) essay on
Levinas, Violence et mtaphysique, first published in 1964, which
was written immediately after the book appeared, Derrida apparently
wanted still to defend Husserl against Levinas by affirming that the
notion of a past which could not be thought in the form of a present
(past) marks what is impossible-unthinkable-unspeakable not only for a
philosophy in general, but even for a thinking of Being that would
take a step out of philosophy.47 He insisted on the fact that the
absolute identity of the living present had to be understood as self-
identity of the self-non-identity and tried to show that Husserls Fifth
Cartesian Meditation could resist the Levinasian critique; specifically
he recalled that the question of the anteriority in relation to the
constitution of ones own alterity and the constitution of the alterity
of the other subject is a false problem.48 But in 1967 in Speech and
Phenomena, he situates himself no longer inside phenomenology and
philosophy, but at the margins of them, in a proximity both to the
Levinasian heterology and to the Heideggerian de-struction of
onto-theology. He acknowledges that within philosophy there is no
possible objection concerning the privilege of the present-now that
defines the very element of philosophical thought; and he opposes
the philosophy of presence to what he is himself trying to promote,
i.e., a thought of non-presence.49 It seems that in a non-explicit
manner, between 1964 and 1967, Derrida finally adopted the Levinasian
conception of time as diachrony and relation to the infinity of
the absolutely Other50 and followed him in his escape from the
traditional thinking of Being.51 Now Husserl is accused of sharing the
RP 36_f5_45-62 11/13/06 11:56 AM Page 53

53

obstinate [metaphysical] desire to save presence and to reduce or

derive the sign;52 the trace is said to be older than presence,53 self
non-identity being considered as the origin of self-identity.
But the otherness in the self is not immediately, for Derrida, the
otherness of the other subject, as it is for Levinas. It is the otherness
of death and of the contingency of factual existence that is dissimu-
lated in the metaphysical belief that presence is the universal form of
transcendantal life: The relationship with my death (my disappearance
in general) thus lurks in this determination of being as presence,
ideality, the absolute possibility of repetition.54 As Derrida explains in
the Introduction to La voix et le phnomne, the Husserlian phenomenology
is a philosophy of life that sees in death only a worldly accident and
discovers, as does all metaphysics, within life itself the possibility of a
duplication between two levels of experience; this possibility is at the
basis of the difference between the empirical and the transcendental
ego. However, this this does not mean that the duplication should be
understood as a new form of Platonism, for the transcendental ego is
not an ontological double of the empirical ego, but remains paradoxically
identical with it in spite of its transcendentality. And this identity can
be discovered in language itself, which is, as Derrida points out, what
seems to unify life and ideality.55 In 1962, Derrida remarked already
that language is the very element of reduction insofar as it operates a
spontaneous neutralization of all facticity, speaking being the practice
of an immediate eidetic.56 But this deadly power of language, which,
as Derrida pointed out, had already been thematized by Hegel and
by the French poets Mallarm and Valry, who were marked by
Hegelianism, is only the reverse side of its constitutive power by which
it opens the infinite realm of ideality. In 1962, Derrida explained that
the word has an ideal value since it is not identical with any of its
empirical, phonetic or graphic materializations,57 which are considered
as equally factual and worldly. In 1967, speech and writing are no
longer put on the same level; and Derrida insists now on the fact that
in uttering a word, I elevate myself to the level of its ideal content,
which can be indefinitely repeated in such a way that speech appears
as the medium by which I can surmount my own facticity and mortality,
ideality being, in Derridas own words, the preservation or mastery
of presence in repetition.58
Here one might consider that this operation of idealization, by
which the speaking subject becomes in a way immortal, concerns only
the logical or grammatical structure of language and not its factual
RP 36_f5_45-62 11/13/06 11:56 AM Page 54

54

appearances in speech and writing. But the phonetic element of lan-

guage is not completely factual; for, as Saussure showed, there is a
difference between the real word and its sound image (image
acoustique), and only this one, as mental impression constitutes the
signifier. The difference between signified and signifier does not coincide
with the difference between the sensible and the intelligible, so that
the sign becomes in its entirety an internal reality. Saussure can
consequently declare that without moving our lips or tongue, we can
talk to ourselves or recite mentally a selection of verse.59 The possi-
bility of inner discourse is therefore asserted. But it must be underscored
that this presupposes the Saussurian distinction between language (langue)
and speech ( parole), which may not be considered as the final word
on the essence of language. For Saussure, the speech organs are as
external to language as the electrical apparatus used for the transmission
of the Morse alphabet are extraneous to this alphabet,60 so that for
him, in opposition to Humboldt, semantic articulation and phonetic
articulation are separated.61 It is true that Humboldt also understands
language on the basis of both mouth and ear, as does Derrida, who,
in his reading of Husserl, emphasizes the fact that when I speak, it
belongs to the phenomenological essence of this operation that I hear
myself at the same time I speak.62 But what essentially constitutes lan-
guage is for Humboldt the phenomenon of articulation, which requires
the living resonance of the voice, so that for him there cannot be
a separation between language and speech.
If at this point we go back to Husserl, we have to acknowledge that
he makes a strict distinction between the logical process of signification
and the worldy process of speaking. As Derrida emphasizes, the signifier
that is still a mental image for Saussure becomes for Husserl a non-
real component of living experience, as well as the signified itself, the
noema.63 Consequently, real words are not needed in soliloquy, because
I communicate nothing to myself and do not have to pass through
the world in order to indicate my thought to somebody else. But such
a description of soliloquy is valid only under the presupposition that
the thinking process does not necessarily imply words or that pure
expression does exist. It is therefore only valid for the phenomeno-
logical interpretation of voice, i.e., for the phenomenological voice, which
Derrida already in the Introduction defines as this spiritual flesh
that continues to speak and be present to itselfto hear itselfin
the absence of the world, but not for the voice as such. In Sein und Zeit
Heidegger was still dependent on this phenomenological conception of
RP 36_f5_45-62 11/13/06 11:56 AM Page 55

55

language when he explained in 18 that Dasein can disclose some-

thing akin to significations which in turn found the possible being of
words and language; this is indicated in a later marginal note that
says Untrue. Langage is not an added storey [aufgestockt], but is the
primordial essence of truth as there [Da].64 In Sein und Zeit language
is not, as it will be later, after the Kehre, an original phenomenon but
a founded one, whose existential-ontological foundation is to be found
in discourse. The distinction made there between language (Sprache)
and discourse (Rede) is analogous to the Husserlian difference between
expression and indication. But even there, the analysis of the phe-
nomenon of the voice that takes place in 5559 is not understood,
as it is the case in the Husserlian soliloquy, as the experience of an
absolute proximity to oneself. It is true that the relation of Dasein to
itself can only take the form of the voice of conscience. And Heidegger
stresses that this way of speaking of the call or voice of conscience is
not at all metaphorical, precisely because it is not essential to discourse
to be phonetically uttered: the German Stimme does not have primarily
the vocal sense of the Greek phon, but means merely a disclosing, a
giving-to-understand.65 That is why voice and call can be modes of
discourse, and not only of language, exactly in the same sense as
hearing, which does not mean primarily acoustic perception. But the
soundless voice of conscience, because it has the character of a call,
cannot be simply and solely understood as the mode of an immediate
self-presence: a call always calls from afar to afar (aus der Ferne und in
die Ferne). The self-presence of Daseinand not of the transcendental
subjectcan only signify proximity in distance, because self-affection
through the call of conscience does not happen in the intimacy of
solitary life but in everydayness, i.e., in a being preoccupied with the
world, in a being whose self is not pure interiority but temporalization,
i.e., self-differance and self-differing. The uncanniness or otherness
heredie Unheimlichkeit 66comes from the foreign character of the voice
that is calling. It is true that in the call of conscience, Dasein and not
a transcendent being calls itself and that the being who is called is
at the same time the being who calls. But the calling happens abruptly
and unwillingly: it calls (Es ruft)67 and still, it is not the call of
the other. This means therefore that the voice calling cannot come
from within the world, from Dasein in everydayness who is immersed
in a familiar world. Nevertheless, it does not come from somewhere
out of the world; it comes from Dasein as being thrown into the world
and as one whose original relation to world is not familiarity, but the
RP 36_f5_45-62 11/13/06 11:56 AM Page 56

56

feeling of not being at home, i.e., Angst.68 The voice calling, foreign
to everydayness, however, is friendly, in the sense that it calls Dasein
to his most proper power-to-be.69
Voice and language are not for Heidegger what they are for Husserl,
i.e., the element of ideality. And this becomes even more obvious after
the period of Sein und Zeit. In a note added in the margin of page 161
of Sein und Zeit, where the question is about the relationship between
discourse and language, Heidegger remarked that thrownness is essential
to language. And in On the Way to Language, there is the following
sentence: The essential relation between death and language, a lightning
flash, lights up: but it is still unthought.70 For Derrida, such an essential
relation can exist only between writing and death, the complicity
between idealization and voice being unfailing in Husserl. But it
seems at the same time that what is said in Speech and Phenomena
on the phenomenological voice is valid for the voice as such. Derrida explains,
for example, that in speech the sensible body of the signifier seems
to fade away at the very moment it is produced,71 so that the living
act of speaking does not risk death. However the main difference
between speech and writing is the fact that writing, as Husserl said,
is a communication which has in a way become virtual, the writ-
ing communication being possible in the absence of the actual speaker.72
But for Husserl writing is still a means of communication. For Derrida
it becomes the common name for signs which functions despite the
total absence of the subject, because of (beyond) his death; the death
of the writer and the disappearance of the object he was able to
describe are not able to prevent a text from having a meaning.73 It
becomes clear here that even if speech involves an otherness in itself,
only writing can really be detached from the living subject. But at the
same time, writing becomes something more general that concerns
speech also insofar as it is no longer considered in a phenomenological,
i.e., philosophical, perspective. This explains the sudden appearance of
the word protowriting (archi-criture) at the end of the chapter dedicated
to the voice, where Derrida wants to show, against Husserl, that
hearing oneself speak is not the inwardness of an inside that is closed
in upon itself, but the irreducible openness into the inside, the
eye and the world within speech. 74
It is only in De la grammatologie that it will become obvious that the
question is not to rehabilitate writing in the narrow sense, nor to
reverse the order of dependence [between speech and writing].75
Protowriting includes therefore both writing in the narrow sense and
RP 36_f5_45-62 11/13/06 11:56 AM Page 57

57

speech, since in both of them we find this same movement of differ-

ance, which is named trace and which opens the temporalization of
time as a spacing.76 Nevertheless, Derrida indicates that he continues
to call it merely writing, because it communicates in an essential
manner with the vulgar concept of writing, which could only impose
itself through the dissimulation of protowriting.77 Such a decision is
of great importance: especially among the so-called Derridians, it
has the effect of increasing the ambiguity of the word writing, which
today is subject to inflation even worse than was already the case
in 1967 for the word language.78 However, what should not be
forgotten is that such words as trace and protowriting cannot be
used as conceptual toolsand it is the same with differance, which
is, as Derrida explains, not even a wordbecause they cannot be
described in the field of metaphysics and remain, as names of a non-
origin, totally unheard-of,79 so that a phenomenology of writing is
impossible.80
For what implies writing as protowriting is nothing else than death
itself, as far as the relationship to death constitutes the concrete
structure of the living present.81 As Derrida explains in Speech and
Phenomena, if the meaning-intention can function emptily and ifas
Husserl declaresthere is no need of an intuition in order to under-
stand a statement, this means that my death is structurally necessary
to the pronouncing of I and that this is valid also in presence of a
full and actual intuition of myself.82 We therefore encounter here the
paradoxical idea that speech requires the death of the speaking
subject, speech as such and not only writing; and Derrida insists on the fact
that this is the ordinary story of language, so that the anonymity of
the written I is the normal situation of each speaking subject.83 Language
can be named writing, because, like writing, it implies the death of
the speaker, his radical absence. In Derridas view, if Husserl does not
draw the same conclusion from the premises of his pure logical gram-
mar founded on the principle of the independence of intention and
intuition, it is because the theme of full presence, the intuitionistic
imperative, and the project of knowledge continue to command . . .
the whole of description.84 It is true that Husserls thought remains
emprisoned in the scheme of the subject-object relation and that he
still defines sense in general on the basis of truth as objectivity, which
could lead him to relegate to absolute nonsense all poetic language
that transgresses the laws of this grammar.85 But the problem here is
that such a metaphysics of presence is not only to be found among
RP 36_f5_45-62 11/13/06 11:56 AM Page 58

58

philosophers but can also, contrary to Derridas opinion, be shared by

the poets, who may not be willing to renounce, even when they play
with words, saying something and for whom, as is said in a famous poem
by Stefan George, where word breaks off no thing may be.86 It is
quite true that in all forms of non-discursive significationwe could
add in all kinds of statements that do not have the form of a logos
apophantikosthere are modes of sense which do not point to any
possible objects,87 but this does not imply that they do not refer to
the things themselves. Words are, there, a way of saying another
kind of presence than the objective one: the presence of things, which
are not objects because they are part of a world that cannot be
objectively described, the presence of what is absent, of past and future,
which cannot be objectively presented, and the presence-absence of
the poetic being itself, who, as Heidegger remarked, is not already
dead, but rather continuously dying.88
For Derrida, who, in a radical manner, opposes life and death,
presence and absence, we are forever exiled in the labyrinth of
representation without any hope of getting out in the sun of presence;
this is the reason why we speak, namely, in order to make up for
the breakup of presence.89 For him life is constantly interconnected
with death and is as such nothing else than this economy of death;
this explains why all graphem has a testamentory essence.90 But the
relation to death can have another meaning, one that can lead to
another attitude toward absence than trying to supply for it. It is
possible to see in death, as Heidegger did, at the same time the shrine
of nothingness and the shelter of Being.91 This means that, as mor-
tals, we are open to the coming into presence of world only because
we have a relatedness to this radical absence that is death. We have
to support it. We have even to bear witness to it by existing in our
mortality.
Metaphysics of presence: it seems at first to be a Heideggerian
expression, but we cannot find it as such in Heideggers work. For
Derridas attempt at a grammatology,92 presence means always full
presence and is opposed to absence, whereas for Heideggers phe-
nomenology of the inapparent,93 presence means permanent pres-
ence (bestndige Anwesenheit) and is opposed to the inapparent event of
the coming into presence of what comes into presence (Anwesung des
Anwesenden). For both of them, metaphysics means the denegation of
death, of the limitless occultation and oblivion from which we emerge
and to which we have to return. For Heidegger, death is the limit
RP 36_f5_45-62 11/13/06 11:56 AM Page 59

59

that grants us our temporal presence in the world; for Derrida, death
is what breaks time and disrupts presence.
In his 2004 text dedicated to Ricur, Derrida recalls with emotion
and approbation Ricurs judgment on his White Mythology in La
mtaphore vive, where he writes that [Derridas] master-stroke here
consists in entering into the metaphorics not through the door of birth,
but, if I may say so, through the door of death.94 What has perhaps
remained unthought for Derrida himself is the fact that the door of
birth and the door of death are one and the same.95

NOTES

1. Le problme de la gense dans la philosophie de Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de

France, 1990).
2. Jai le double sentiment que dun ct, pour le dire en souriant et immodeste-
ment, on na pas commenc me lire, que sil y a certes, beaucoup de bons
lecteurs (quelques dizaines au monde peut-tre), au fond, cest plus tard que tout
cela a une chance dapparatre; mais bien aussi que, dun autre ct, quinze jours
ou un mois aprs ma mort, il ne restera plus rien. Sauf ce qui est gard par le dpt
lgal en bibliothque. Je vous le jure, je crois sincrement et simultanment ces
deux hypothses ( Jacques Derrida, Je suis en guerre contre moi-mme, Propos
recueillis par J. Birnbaum, Le Monde, Thursday, August 19, 2004, 12).
3. See Lcriture et la diffrence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 40928.
4. Published first in the Bulletin de la Socit franaise de Philosophie 62, no. 3 ( July/September
1968); reprinted in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 129.
5. See Lendurance de la pense. Pour saluer Jean Beaufret (Paris: Plon, 1968), 21959.
Reprinted in Marges de la philosophie, 3178.
6. See F. Dastur, Finitude and Repetition in Husserl and Derrida, in Spindel
Conference 1993, Derridas Interpretation of Husserl, ed. L. Lawlor, Supplement,
The Southern Journal of Philosophy 32 (1994): 11330.
7. See F. Dastur, Heidegger and Derrida: On Play and Difference, Epoch, A Journal
for the History of Philosophy (Brigham Young University) (1996): 123.
8. See E. Husserl, Lorigine de la gomtrie, translation and introduction by J. Derrida
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), 83; English translation by Nicolas
Hays, Edmund Husserls The Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (Stony Brook, New
York, 1978), 87. Hereafter cited as OG, followed by page numbers first to French
then to English edition.
9. OG, 148/135.
10. OG, 137/127.
11. OG, 129 n. 2/121.
12. M. Merleau-Ponty gave a first commentary of this text in his lecture at the Collge
de France, Husserl aux limites de la phnomnologie (see Rsums de cours [Paris:
Gallimard, 1968], 157f.).
13. OG, 83/87.
14. M. Merleau-Ponty, Rsums de cours, 166.
15. La voix et le phnomne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), 9091; trans-
lated by David B. Allison as Speech and Phenomena (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1973), 8081. Hereafter cited as VP, followed by page numbers first to
French then to English edition.
RP 36_f5_45-62 11/13/06 11:56 AM Page 60

60

16. See J. Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), Avertissement, p. 7,

note 1.
17. VP, 64 /58.
18. Ibid., 72/64.
19. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phnomnologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 479; trans-
lated by C. Smith as Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1999), 419 (my
emphasis). Hereafter cited as PP, followed by page numbers first to French then
to English edition.
20. Ibid., 75/67 (translation modified).
21. J. Derrida, De la grammatologie, 1023.
22. Ibid., 69: La trace, o se marque le rapport lautre.
23. Ibid., 92: Sans une rtention dans lunit minimale de lexprience temporelle,
sans une trace retenant lautre comme autre dans le mme (my emphasis).
24. PP, 477/417.
25. Ibid., 478, 480/418, 419.
26. De la grammatologie, 9798.
27. PP, 481/421.
28. De la grammatologie, 105.
29. See G. Granel, Le sens du temps et de la perception chez E. Husserl (Paris, Gallimard,
1968), 112: Ce que la philosophie construit toujours, une maquette ontique de la
vrit ontologique. It has to be recalled that Grard Granel and Jacques Derrida
studied together in the Ecole Normale and were at that time close friends (Granel
wrote one of the first texts dedicated to Derrida that was published in Critique in
1967), so that it is very likely that Derrida had some knowledge of Granels research
on Husserl in this period.
30. See E. Husserl, Zur Phnomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (Den Haag: Nijhoff,
1966), 75, 36.
31. VP, 73/65.
32. Zur Phnomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, 81, 39.
33. Ibid., Beilage IX, p. 119. The title of this appendix is: Originary consciousness
[Urbewusstsein] and possibility of reflexion. Derrida reproduces here a misreading
of the French translator, Henri Dussort, who transformed the adjective urbewusst
into unbewusst.
34. VP, 71/63.
35. Lcriture et la diffrence, 302.
36. OG, 170/152.
37. Ibid., 20/38.
38. Ibid., 53f./64.
39. Ibid., 170/153 (translation modified).
40. De la grammatologie, 35: ces sciences ne sont plus domines par les questions dune
phnomnologie transcendantale ou dune ontologie fondamentale.
41. Ibid., 134.
42. See, for example, J. Derrida/E. Roudinesco, De quoi demain . . . (Paris: Flammarion,
2003), 27980: Je me trompe peut-tre, mais le a, le moi, le surmoi, le moi
idal, lidal du moi, le processus secondaire et le processus primaire du refoule-
ment, etc.en un mot les grandes machines freudiennes (y compris le concept et
le mot dinconscient)ne sont mes yeux que des armes provisoires, voire des
outils rhtoriques bricols contre une philosophie de la conscience, de lintention-
nalit transparente et pleinement responsable. Je ne crois gure leur avenir. Je
ne pense pas quune mtapsychologie puisse rsister longtemps lexamen. On en
parle dj presque plus.
43. J. Derrida, Marges de la philosophie, 21: Une certaine altritFreud lui donne le
nom mtaphysique dinconscientest dfinitivement soustraite tout processus de
RP 36_f5_45-62 11/13/06 11:56 AM Page 61

61

prsentation par lequel nous lappellerions se montre en personne . . . lincon-

scient nest pas plus . . . une chose quune conscience virtuelle ou masque. Cette
altrit radicale par rapport tout mode possible de prsence se marque en des
effets irrductibles daprs-coup, de retardement. Et pour les dcrire . . . le discours
mtaphysique de la phnomnologie est inadquat (my emphasis).
44. Ibid., 22.
45. E. Levinas, En dcouvrant lexistence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1967), 198,
201. In fact the exact expression of an original past, a past that has never been
present can be found in Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Perception ( p. 242) in
relation, not to the other, but to the unreflexive fund of experience always presupposed
by reflection. Levinas uses the expression of a past irreducible to a present that
it would have been ( pass irrductible un prsent quil et t) in a much later text,
Diachronie et reprsentation (Entre nous. Essai sur le penser lautre [Paris: Grasset,
1991], 41).
46. See J. Derrida, La parole, in Ricur (Paris: LHerne, 2004), 2122. It was in
1961 and not, as Derrida writes, in 1962 that Totality and Infinity (which was the
text of a doctoral thesis whose director was Ricur) was published.
47. Lcriture et la diffrence, 194: La notion dun pass dont le sens ne pourrait tre
pens dans la forme dun prsent (pass) marque limpossible-impensable-indicible
non seulement pour une philosophie en gnral, mais mme pour une pense de
ltre qui voudrait faire un pas hors de la philosophie. As he indicates in a foot-
note at the beginning of his essay (p. 117), Derrida could only make some allu-
sive remarks to The Trace of this Other, which was first published in 1963,
during the time when Derrida was writing Violence et mtaphysique.
48. Ibid.: La question de lantriorit dans le rapport entre la constitution de lautre
comme autre prsent et de 1autre comme autrui est une fausse question.
49. VP, 70/6263 (translation modified).
50. See E. Levinas 1979 preface to Le temps et lautre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1983), 10.
51. See E. Levinas first book, De lvasion (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1982).
52. VP, 57/51.
53. VP, 76/68.
54. VP, 60/54.
55. VP, 9/10.
56. OG, 58/67.
57. Ibid.
58. VP, 8/9.
59. F. de Saussure, Cours de linguistique gnrale (Paris: Payot, 1916), 98. Quoted by
Derrida in VP, 51/46.
60. Cours de linguistique gnrale, 36: Les organes vocaux sont aussi extrieurs la langue
que les appareils lectriques qui servent transmettre lalphabet Morse sont trangers
cet alphabet.
61. On Humboldts conception of language and voice, see F. Dastur, Telling Time,
Sketch of a Phenomenological Chrono-logy (London: Athlone, 2000), 50f.
62. VP, 87/77.
63. VP, 52/47.
64. M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, vol. 2 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1977), 87; translated by J. Stambaugh as Being and Time (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1996), 82 (translation modified). Hereafter
cited as SZ, followed by page numbers first to German then to English edition.
65. SZ, 271/251.
66. SZ, 276/255.
67. SZ, 275/254.
RP 36_f5_45-62 11/13/06 11:56 AM Page 62

62

68. SZ, 276, 189/255, 177.

69. SZ, 163/153.
70. On the Way to Language, trans. P. D. Hertz (New York: Harper and Row, 1971),
107.
71. VP, 86/77. It would be easy to show that we experience the same phenomenon
in writing and in reading, where we never focus on the sensible exteriority of
the graphism as such. This is also true for poetry, insofar as the sensible element
of sound and writing is never considered separately from meaning. And this would
also be valid for a non-phonetic kind of writing.
72. OG, 84/87.
73. VP, 104/93.
74. VP, 96/86.
75. De la grammatologie, 82: Il ne sagit pas de rhabiliter lcriture au sens troit, ni
de renverser lordre de dpendance.
76. VP, 96/86.
77. De la grammatologie, 83: Archi-criture . . . que nous ne continuons appeler criture
que parce quelle communique essentiellement avec le concept vulgaire de lcriture.
Celui-ci na pu historique simposer que par la dissimulation de larchi-criture.
Derrida, in a surprising manner, appeals here to the distinction made by Heidegger
in connection with time between a vulgar and an originary concepta distinction
that he is at the same time strongly critizing in Ousia and gramm, a text to
which he refers in De la grammatologie (p. 105).
78. De la grammatologie, 16f.
79. De la grammatologie, 95.
80. De la grammatologie, 99.
81. De la grammatologie, 103: le rapport la mort comme structure concrte du prsent
vivant.
82. VP, 108/96.
83. VP, 108/97.
84. VP, 108/97.
85. VP, 111/99.
86. See Heideggers commentary on the poem in On the Way to Language, 139f.
87. VP, 111/99.
88. See M. Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, vol. 20 of Gesamtausgabe
(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1979), 43738. Here Heidegger explains that
the true definition of Dasein is not the Cartesian cogito sum, but sum moribundus, the
moribundus solely giving his meaning to the sum. On the contrary, Derrida declares
in Speech and Phenomena (p. 94) that the absence of myself is the origin of the tran-
scendental subject and explains the ergo sum.
89. VP, 117/104.
90. De la grammatologie, 100: tout graphme est dessence testamentaire.
91. See M. Heidegger, The Thing, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter
(New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 179.
92. Attempt only, for as Derrida stresses, there cannot be a science, i.e., a logos of
grammai.
93. See M. Heidegger, Fours Seminars, trans. A. Mitchell and F. Raffoul (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2003), 80.
94. P. Ricur, La mtaphore vive (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 362: (Le coup de matre, ici, est
dentrer dans la mtaphorique non par la porte de la naissance, mais si jose dire,
par la porte de la mort). See J. Derrida, La parole, 24. In quoting Ricurs
sentence, Derrida writes erronously metaphysics instead of metaphoricsa
quite significant lapsus linguae or litterae.
95. I am grateful to John Sallis for assistance in rendering this text into English.