Derrida on the history of phenomenology

Abstract

In this paper, we have examined various aporias that afflict phenomenology- Husserl’s phenomenological reduction cannot hold if the transcendental is separate from the empirical, indeed, nothing separates the transcendental and the empirical and thus they are essentially the same. We demonstrated that Heidegger’s repeated attempts to inverse to negate metaphysics only reproduced metaphysics as a ghostly double that returned to haunt his anti-metaphysics which remained bound to its ontological structure and vocabulary. We showed through readings of Levinas, Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty and Blanchot that their radical empiricisms and privilege of Other over the same repeated metaphysics like Heidegger, in negating it and reversing its structure, thus reproducing and affirming it paradoxically. In all these demonstrations we have shown that the impossibility of a text is precisely its site of possibility, deconstruction proceeds by exposing the limit of a text and then de-limiting it towards the Other that it had repressed, its method is thus transgression and exceeding of limits imposed by a text towards its blindspots through exposing an aporia, and then proceeding to show the unthought of a text that needs to be thought in order to address this aporia.
Keywords: Derrida; Transcendental; Empirical; Quasi-transcendental ; Metaphysics