Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Is it Time?
- 2 The Aporia of the Instant in Derrida's Reading of Husserl
- 3 Existential Moments
- 4 Augen-Blicke
- 5 On Alain Badiou
- 6 Instants of Diminishing Representation: The Problem of Temporal Modalities
- 7 Poetry and the Returns of Time: Goethe's ‘Wachstum’ and ‘Immer und Überall’
- 8 ‘Now’: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
2 - The Aporia of the Instant in Derrida's Reading of Husserl
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Is it Time?
- 2 The Aporia of the Instant in Derrida's Reading of Husserl
- 3 Existential Moments
- 4 Augen-Blicke
- 5 On Alain Badiou
- 6 Instants of Diminishing Representation: The Problem of Temporal Modalities
- 7 Poetry and the Returns of Time: Goethe's ‘Wachstum’ and ‘Immer und Überall’
- 8 ‘Now’: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
Socr. You know, Phaedrus, there is a strange thing about writing which makes it analogous to painting. The painter's products stand before us as though they were alive: but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words: they seem to talk to you as though they have something in mind but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing for ever. And once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn't know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong. And when it is ill-treated and unfairly abused it always needs its parent to come to its help, being unable to defend or help itself.
PlatoWhat You Rightly Doubt
At a culminating point in Speech and Phenomena Derrida writes that phenomenology, whether it wishes so or not, knows so or not, is always a phenomenology of perception. The irony of this remark is not difficult to grasp: indeed, what is it that phenomenology deals with, if not that which appears to our senses as phenomenon? The trouble, however, is that perception as such is strictly speaking impossible since what appears to us as phenomenon, immanent to our consciousness, is not being ‘as such’ which remains assigned to a transcendent realm; and indeed this is the fundamental problem for Husserl who is well aware that all that appears to be immanent to our consciousness reveals itself to be surrounded by all sorts of transcendences after a deeper examination. Thus the issue is not to deny the world but rather to ask to what extent perception may be justified, namely how one may get perception ‘as such’; nor is the issue to abolish presence but rather to question why – ultimately – there is so little presence.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The MomentTime and Rupture in Modern Thought, pp. 33 - 52Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2001