Derrida, then, gives the name “trace” to the part played by the radically other within the structure of difference that is the sign. (I stick to “trace” in my translation, because it “looks the same” as Derrida’s word; the reader must remind himself of at least the track, even the spoor, contained within the French word.) In spite of itself, Saussurean linguistics recognizes the structure of the sign to be a trace-structure. And Freud’s psychoanalysis, to some extent in spite of itself, recognizes the structure of experience itself to be a trace-, not a presencestructure. Following an argument analogical to the argument on the sign, Derrida puts the word “experience” under erasure: As for the concept of experience, it is most unwieldy here. Like all the notions I am using, it belongs to the history of metaphysics and we can only use it under erasure. “Experience” has always designated the relationship with a presence, whether that relationship had the form of consciousness or not. Yet we must, by means of the sort of contortion and contention that discourse is obliged to undergo, exhaust the resources of the concept of experience before attaining and in order to attain, by deconstruction, its ultimate foundation. It is the only way to escape “empiricism” and the “naive” critiques of experience at the same time (89, 6o).
Posted on: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 07:20:24 +0000
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