A Phenomenological Grammatology? Jacques Derrida and the (Quasi-)Transcendental Origin of Experience

Phenomenology is traditionally understood as the philosophy of experience par excellence, often identifying experience with presence. However, Derrida’s peculiar ‘phenomenology’ is characterized precisely by the attempt to reflect upon that non-experienceable that constitutes the experience. While his thought is frequently seen as a departure from phenomenology, I argue that Derrida belongs to the transcendental lineage inaugurated by Kant and developed by Husserl and Heidegger. Yet, unlike his predecessors, he radicalizes the question of givenness by showing that the conditions of experience are structurally unmanifest, non-phenomenal, and ultimately indiscernible. In this paper, I will argue that Derrida’s grammatological project far from being a mere investigation of language, is rather a thorough phenomenological inquiry into the conditions of manifestation of the world and their limits. Firstly, I will present how Derrida approaches the question of transcendentality, which is faced by testing its limits. Indeed, Derrida carries out a meta-reflection on the transcendental, investigating its genesis and asking for the ultra-transcendental conditions of possibility of transcendental itself. Secondly, I will show how Derrida deepens the Husserlian and Heideggerian inquiries on the horizontality of the world by the ‘concept’ of trace and by questioning the very movement of formation of the form, that is, the movement of constitution of the world. Paradoxically, the trace is ‘something’ that covers the entire field of entities but, at the same time, is the differential movement that, devoid of any positivity, forbids their full presence. Finally, I will conclude that, for these reasons, the world, and experience in general, has to be read as a complex fabric of traces, that is, as a text. Such textuality of experience means that everything is ab origine marked by absence and empiricality, and it is tantamount to claim that what makes presence possible is precisely what makes it impossible.