Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida on The Absolute

Abstract

Derrida shows that the relation between the eidetic reduction and the absolute origin is one of repetition – the reduction is the iteration of the noema. It re-awakens the dependence of sense with respect to the institutive and creative act of the absolute origin which, far from being submerged and lost, is re-activated through the reduction through repetition with a difference in the present. This de-sediments the concealed origin of the past and re-activates it in the present and future. The Absolute origin of the past which was instituted creatively “for the first time” by the first geometers is thus re-activated through the reduction through the iteration of the noema, or the repetition of the Absolute with a difference in the present. This origin is produced only retrospectively through the act of repetition, signalling to a presence that never existed. Repetition produces the subsequent division into transcendental and empirical retrospectively signalling to a presence that must have existed but was never there through the differentiating movement of the trace.