Parallax

ISSN: 1353-4645 (Print) 1460-700X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tpar20

Conjuring Time: Jacques Derrida, Between

Testimony and Literature

Francesco Vitale

To cite this article: Francesco Vitale (2011) Conjuring Time: Jacques Derrida, Between Testimony
and Literature, Parallax, 17:1, 54-64, DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2011.531179

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2011.531179

Published online: 18 Jan 2011.

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 parallax, 2011, vol. 17, no. 1, 54–64

Conjuring Time:
Jacques Derrida, Between Testimony and Literature
Francesco Vitale

Et voilà l’essentiel du message testimonial

qui passe dans le sang de la re´alite´
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à travers l’e´piderme de la fiction

Jacques Derrida, Demeure.1

“Can one think of a transcendental performative?”

“No way”
“Perhaps . . . ”
In Adieu to Emmanuel Le´vinas, in an elliptical passage, where one would find very
difficult to distinguish the affirmation of absolute fidelity to Lévinas from the most
absolute infidelity, Jacques Derrida maintains that there is no oath without the
possibility of perjury, that oath and perjury imply one another and that the co-
implication would be of transcendental nature:

Though Lévinas never puts it in these terms, I will risk pointing out
the necessity of this double bind in what follows from the axioms
established or recalled by Lévinas: if the face to face with the unique
engages the infinite ethics of my responsibility for the other in a sort of
oath before the letter, an unconditional respect or fidelity, then the
ineluctable emergence of the third, and, with it, of justice, would
signal an initial perjury [ perjure ]. Silent, passive, painful, but
inevitable, such perjury is not accidental and secondary, but is as
originary as the experience of the face. [ . . . ] Henceforth, in the
operation of justice one can no longer distinguish between fidelity to
oath and the perjury of false witness, and even before this, between
betrayal and betrayal, always more than one betrayal. One should
then, with all requisite analytical prudence, respect the quality,
modality and situation of these breaches of the sworn word, of this
“primordial word of honor” before all oaths. But such differences
would never efface the trace of the inaugural perjury. Like the third
who does not wait, the proceedings that open both ethics and justice
are in the process of committing quasi-transcendental or originary,
indeed, pre-originary, perjury.2

parallax
ISSN 1353-4645 print/ISSN 1460-700X online q 2011 Francesco Vitale
parallax http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
54 DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2011.531179
 An oath which is avant la lettre, an originary given word, prior to all actually
pronounced empirical oaths – a non accidental perjury, and, therefore, necessary,
originary, inaugural, quasi-transcendental, even pre-originary . . .

The accumulation of these terms describes with approximation – without ever

naming it à la lettre – the transcendental order where one should inscribe the
articulation/co-implication of oath and perjury. It is of this order that Derrida
invites us to make experience through the articulation/co-implication of oath and
perjury. What is at stake here is a transcendental research, according to the
phenomenological method that Derrida has never denied but deconstructed, whose
end should be the description of a ‘field of transcendental experience’,3 determined
through experience itself, the description of universal structures of experience,
singled out as conditions of possibility: in this case, the experience of oath, and, more
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precisely, of testimony. To make it clear: through our experience of testimony, a

determinate experience within the tradition of Western thought, with its practical
and institutional articulations (religious, philosophical, juridical, political and even
literary).

In Adieu Derrida seems to follow Lévinas, at least up to a certain point: through

the experience of testimony he goes back to the act of faith necessarily implied in the
testimonial performative. He recognizes there the condition of possibility of
the relationship to the other and, thus, the condition of possibility of being-with-
others, in view of a community to come.4 In any case, for Derrida, through the
experience of testimony, it is possible to access the universal structure of a still more
general experience which would account for the opening of the ethico-juridico-political
space, but also for the space where the sense comes to articulate itself. In Adieu Derrida
points at the trace of this opening there where he refers to the ‘third’ – justice, right,
language? – which would not be second with respect to the vis-à-vis that for Lévinas
inaugurates the ethical relation, a ‘third’ which would be co-originary and, perhaps,
even pre-originary with respect to the vis-à-vis, of which, therefore, it would be the
condition of possibility and, at the same time, the deepest threat, that is, perjury.

To describe this universal structure of experience one must reckon with the
possibility of the false testimony necessarily implied in all testimonial acts and, more
precisely, of fiction as the condition of possibility of true discourse.

Therefore, it is necessary to address an experience of testimony where these

oppositions are structurally and constitutively put into question: it is necessary to
address literature, a certain experience of literature, which takes the questioning of
sense as the very sense or play of literature.

Between fiction and testimony: literature

In our European juridical tradition, testimony should remain unrelated
to literature and especially, in literature, to what presents itself [se donne ]
as fiction, simulation or simulacra, which is not all literature. When a
testifying witness, whether or not he is explicitly under oath, without
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55
 being able or obligated to prove anything, appeals to the faith of the
other by engaging himself to tell the truth – no judge will accept that he
should shirk his responsibility ironically by declaring or insinuating:
what I am telling you retain the status of a literary fiction. And yet, if the
testimonial is by law irreducible to the fictional, there is no testimony
that does not structurally imply in itself the possibility of fiction,
simulacra, dissimulation, lie and perjury – that is to say, the possibility of
literature, of the innocent or perverse literature that innocently plays at
perverting all of these distinctions. If this possibility that it seems to
prohibit were effectively excluded, if testimony thereby became proof,
information, certainty, or archive, it would lose its function as testimony.
In order to remain testimony, it must therefore allow itself to be haunted.
It must allow itself to be parasitized by precisely what it excludes
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from its inner depths [inte´rieur ], the possibility, at least, of literature

[original emphasis].5

This is the opening passage of ‘Fiction and Testimony’, a conference given by

Jacques Derrida a little before Adieu. The text, published in a volume called Demeure,
is dedicated to Maurice Blanchot and, in particular, to the reading of his last story:
The Instant of my Death. Let us follow Derrida following Blanchot’s traces, to isolate
the universal structure of experience, accessible through our experience of testimony.

Here Derrida explicitly affirms the structural – and, thus, non-empirical, non-
contingent – co-implication of oath and perjury, truth and lie evoked in Adieu. And,
above all, he clearly points at the trace to follow: to account for the structure of co-
implication means to access the conditions of possibility – of ‘essential
compossibility’ – of both testimony and literature.

First issue: testimony does not belong to the order of knowledge, of the objective,
documentable and ostensible proof. Where one finds an objective, documentable
and ostensible proof, there is no testimony. The testimonial act is required in absence
of these proofs. This first structural condition – the foreignness to the order of
knowledge – inscribes testimony within the horizon of the other modalities of
attestation sharing that condition: lie, perjury, simulation, fiction and, above all,
literature, which draws its resources from all these modalities and their combination.

This first condition allows one to identify the ultimate structure of testimony: testimony
is the attestation of a singular and irreplaceable presence in a determinate present:

For to testify is always on the one hand to do it at present – the witness must
be present at the stand himself, without technical interpositions. In the
law, testimonial tends, without being able to succeed to this altogether,
to exclude all technical agency. One cannot send a cassette to testify in
one’s place. One must oneself be present, raise one’s hand, speak in the
first person and in the present, and one must do this in order to testify to a
present, to an indivisible moment, that is, at a certain point to a moment
assembled at the tip of an instantaneousness which must resist division. If
that to which I testify is divisible, if the moment in which I testify is
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56
 divisible, if my attestation is divisible, at that moment it is no longer
reliable, it no longer has the value of the truth, reliability, or veracity
that it claims absolutely. Consequently, for testimony there must be the
instant [original emphasis].6

The terms of description are evidently phenomenological, they send us back to the
Husserilan question of the ‘living present’ as an intuitive originary source of any
intentional act which would be full of sense and, thus, as it will be clear soon, to the
genesis of the ideal objects that, according to Husserl, can be considered as true only
if they refer to the source of the ‘living present’, only if they are able to attest,
through their ideal structure, the ‘living present’ as their very original source.

In fact, testimony presupposes the absolute identity of an absolute punctual

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temporal present, related to the absolute identity of the presence in itself, which is
punctual too, that is, the possibility of ‘living present’ and ‘intentional
consciousness’. At the same time, the testimonial act is an act of memory. Testimony
presupposes the possibility to attest one’s presence to oneself in a determinate living
present which is, however, no longer present and living at the moment of the
attestation. Moreover, it must be able to repeat this attestation in a present which
would be different from the present of attestation. Testimony necessarily implies the
phenomenological constitution of the ideal object and, above all, it necessarily
implies the possibility to get through its genesis back to the living present
constituting its original source. Only the possibility of the temporal synthesis
between the constituting living present and the constituted ideal object grants the
truth of attestation. Testimony is true only if it will remember the primary retention
of the living present by means of a constituted ideal object:

And yet, on the other hand, this condition of possibility is destroyed by the
testimony itself. Ocular, auditory, tactile, any sensory perception of the
witness must be an experience. As such, a constituting synthesis entails
time and thus does not limit itself to the instant. The moment one is a
witness and the moment one attests, bears witness, the instant one gives
testimony, there also must be a temporal sequence – sentences, for
example – and, above all, these sentences must promise their own
repetition and thus their own quasi-technical reproducibility. When I
commit myself to speaking the truth, I commit myself to repeating the
same thing, an instant later, two instants later, the next day, and for
eternity, in a certain way [original emphasis].7

At this point we are in trouble with testimony. From Derrida’s point of view we must
be in trouble. One can recall the results of the deconstruction of Husserl’s
phenomenology, of the ‘living present’ and of the genesis of ideal objects8: it is
impossible to get back to the original intuitive source of the living present, the
primary retention has always already been of the order of the re-re-presentation
(Vergegenwärtigung) and not of the intuitive presentation (Darstellung). To operate the
temporal synthesis through which it constitutes itself as such, experience must
necessarily inscribe the punctual present in an iterable trace, a trace structurally
different from the punctual present to which it can only refer without ever
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57
 presenting it, otherwise it would be impossible to refer to such a present in another
moment of experience. Since the beginning memory has worked as writing, even
before the recourse to all systems of graphical notation. Arche-writing is an universal
structure, the irreducible condition of experience and, therefore, of consciousness9:

What I say for the first time, if it is a testimony, is already a repetition,

at least a repeatability; is already an iterability, more than once, more
than an instant in one instant, at the same time; and that being the
case, the instant is always divided at its very point, at the point of its
writing. It is always on the verge [en instance ] of being divided, whence
the problem of idealization. To the extent that is repeatable, the
singular instant becomes an ideal instant. The root of the testimonial
of techne
is to be found here. The technical reproducibility is excluded
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from testimony, which always calls for the presence of the live voice in
the first person. But from the moment that a testimony must be able to
be repeated techne
is admitted; it is introduced where it is excluded.
[...] And it is perhaps here, with the technological both as ideality as
prosthetic iterability, that the possibility of fiction and lie, simulacrum
and literature, that of the right to literature insinuates itself, at the
very origin of truthful testimony, autobiography in good faith, sincere
confession, as their essential compossibility [original emphasis].10

Within the genesis of the iterable trace – arche-writing – which is the condition of
possibility of the constitution of ideal objects, Derrida isolates the structure where it
is possible to find the essential compossibility of oath and perjury, truth and lie,
testimony and literature. From the perspective of the form of the ideal objects, which
testimony necessarily employs, nothing allows one to distinguish the true discourse
from the false one, testimony from fiction. In order to be true attestation must use
universal ideal objects – eventually words – which are in principle intelligible
everywhere and every time and, thus, despite the living presence of the one who
produces them and of the living present of their production. Therefore, what makes
testimony possible is what, in fact, makes impossible to ensure its value of truth. At
least, it works so for the criteria of truth belonging to the order of metaphysics, that
is, the criteria imposed to our experience of truth.

In fact, hinging on these criteria, Derrida’s discourse must be considered – as it was

considered for long time and still is somewhere – as the late effect of nihilism, the
thoughtless and satisfied negation of the possibility of truth. A threat to conjure away.

Yet – as many of us acknowledge now – Derrida’s point is not to deny the possibility of
the attestation of truth but to deconstruct the order of the discourse of the metaphysics of
presence that, with its ill-founded criteria, places our experience of that possibility in an
inevitably aporetic horizon, yielding to nihilism whose matrix is, therefore, shared by
those who, against nihilism, wave the ghost of the uncorrupted fundament. Derrida’s
point is to show – exactly through our experience of testimony – that the criteria of the
attestation of truth are not objective, formal and self-founded. The possibility of truth
necessarily implies one’s assumption of responsibility with respect to oneself and the
other, that is, a performative structure, previous to all empirical and formal distinctions
Vitale
58
 between performative and constative and, therefore, a transcendental performative.
Here, like in other texts, Derrida insists on this aspect.11 Yet, this is not what is at stake –
à demeure – in Demeure.

Here Derrida aims to account for arche-writing as the articulation of a still deeper
universal structure of experience: let us call it, for now and provisionally, the
possibility of the life of the human living. I intend to demonstrate that the arche-
writing at work in the heart of our experience does not imply the ultimate negation of
sense, it is not the index of an incorrigible defect of constitution. It is rather the
necessary condition of possibility of the elaboration of sense as it is constituted to
respond to the very necessity of life, la vie (la mort).

Therefore our experience of testimony is no longer sufficient. It is necessary to move to

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literature, which seems to be haunted by that necessity, and to focus on a certain

experience of literature, which would have taken this necessity as the irreducible
motive of its own writing, that is, Maurice Blanchot’s work, re-read, according to a
strange anachrony, from its last fragment: The Instant of my Death.

Literature, living on
Dying is, speaking absolutely, the incessant imminence whereby
nonetheless endures by desiring. The imminence of what has always
already taken place [de ce que s’est toujours de´jà passe´ ].12

Derrida reads The Instant of my Death taking into account a passage from The Writing
of the Disaster that offers a trace to which Blanchot ceaselessly refers, and works as the
texture of his work.

This is an unbelievable tense. It seems to deport what has always, from all
time, already taken place toward the coming of the to-come. Indeed one
must say unbelievable, for insofar as all testimony essentially appeals to a
certain system [re´gime ] of belief, to faith without proof, to the act of faith
summoned by a kind of transcendental oath, well, faith in a temporal
order, in a certain commonsense ordering of time, is what guarantees the
everyday concept, especially the juridical concept and the dominant
concept of attestation in European culture, that in which literature has
been established, thus confirming or disturbing [ perturbant ] the very
order that conveys it. Imminence, the instance of what will always
already have taken place, will be in question in The Instant of my Death
[original emphasis].13

Here Derrida outlines what, through the testimony of literature, allows him to go
back to the universal structure of experience, inaccessible to our experience of
testimony: if our experience of testimony necessarily implies an act of faith with respect
to the attestation of a past present and, thus, of the temporal synthesis implied by the
attestation (and, therefore, a transcendental oath, preceding and making possible
every enacted oath or perjury), here literature aims to witness a present to come,
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59
 inaccessible to experience: the instant of my death. As Derrida remarks, this aim
hinges on the fact that this present which no one can experience would have always
already happened and, thus, would be a past which would be possible to witness. In
fact, literature can say everything, the literary institution grounds itself exactly on the
right to fiction which frees it from the order of the true discourse to which philosophy is
submitted (as well as our experience of testimony). Yet, it is exactly thanks to this right
that literature can become the privileged field of a transcendental investigation
pointing to the universal structure of experience where one can find the conditions of
possibility of the elaboration of sense before the determinate oppositions between
truth and fiction, testimony and perjury, literature and philosophy. A structure that is
still inaccessible to the philosophical investigation articulating itself within the
opposition that makes it possible. This would be the truth of literature exemplarily
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put at work by Maurice Blanchot.

Now it is possible to indicate the trace leading us to the transcendental research,

which, at this point, we should try to justify: the past Blanchot refers to must not be
taken within the horizon of the temporal development of an actually lived
experience. If it is toujours de´jà passe´, then it is an absolute past anticipating every
lived experience. It is a past which does not belong to the horizon of the lived
experience of someone or someone else in particular. It is a (quasi-)transcendental
past structuring and, therefore, making the lived experience of anyone possible.

One must understand that, according to Blanchot, the relation to death articulates
and makes possible the experience of the living human singularity in general, to
which the very experience of death remains inaccessible. Unless one does not dis-
articulate the link between our experience and the living presence in a living
present. Unless one does not recognize arche-writing as the universal structure of
experience that the living elaborates exactly to respond to its relation to death
making it possible and, at the same time, threatening it.

In this perspective Derrida quotes again a long passage from The Writing of the
Disaster:

Dying means: you are already dead, in an immemorial past, by a

death that was not your own, which you have thus neither known nor
lived, but under the threat of which you believe you are called to live;
you await it henceforth in the future, constructing a future to make it
possible at last, possible as something that will take place belong to
the realm of experience.
To write is no longer to put in the future a death always already past, but
to accept that one must endure it without making it present and without
making oneself present to it; it is to know that the death has taken place
even though it has not been experienced, and to recognize it in the
forgetting that it leaves, whose traces, which can be erased, call upon one
to exempt oneself from the cosmic order, where disaster makes the real
impossible and desire undesirable.
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60
 This uncertain death, always anterior, the attestation of a past without
present, is never individual, just as it overflows the whole [original
emphasis].14

Up to this point we must verify what happens in the The Instant of my Death. Blanchot’s
text is made of a very strict and elliptical story in the first person: a man remembers what
happened to a French guy during the Nazi occupation; taken by the Nazis as partisan or
being close to partisan, he is immediately condemned to death. In front of the firing
squad, when death is inevitable, he survives thanks to an accidental event.

The story has a singular status, between fiction and testimony: within the text,
published according to the institutional protocol of literature, nothing allows one to
recognize the story as autobiographical and, thus, as a testimony. However, arguing
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from a series of extra-textual hints we find out that it is exactly that or, at least, that an
event which is really happened in Blanchot’s life – the avoided execution by Nazis –
can be identified as the reference of the story. So, through the testimony of fiction or the
fiction of testimony, suspended between the two, Blanchot seems to respond to those
who, in recent years, were blaming him for sympathizing with the Nazis during the war.
At the same time, according to Derrida, the story describes the conditions of possibility
of all testimonial attestations and, thus, also of the true discourse in general: author,
narrator and character are the same person, that is, Maurice Blanchot. Yet, this person
is differentiated according to the decisive event that regulates the identity of the person
within the structure of the story: the instant of death. The narrator is no longer the
person who is present and living then when his death seems unavoidable, he is another
man, the man who lives on. Apparently it is only by living on that the narrator can be
the witness of what happened to him and, yet, exactly for this, because he is no longer
present and living in the instant of his death, he can witness it only as if it were the
experience of another, another no longer present and living at the moment of testimony,
then virtually dead. The act of memory performed by the narrator/witness is not a
simple synthesis of present instants in a homogenous temporal horizon, this is an illusion
on which our notion of experience grounds itself. The act of memory depends on the
elaboration of traces which must be absolutely independent from the present and living
instant of experience; this needs to constitute those traces to refer to the past event in
another moment of experience. Experience constitutes itself through the elaboration of
traces in view of a reference to come. The iterable trace, meanwhile, maintains the
reference to a past event as it must ensure the possibility of the experience to come. This
is the lecture of arche-writing as a universal structure of experience, which we have
already appealed to.15 Even if it sounds unbelievable for that fashion of thinking which
conceives of experience in the terms of one’s presence to oneself in a living present in a
homogeneous temporal horizon. A fashion of thinking unable to see in the structure of
arche-writing, of the elaboration of the iterable trace, the necessary effect of the
structure of the living itself.

Here Derrida does not only describe once again, through testimony, the conditions of
possibility of the genesis of ideal objects starting from a universal structure of experience
(memory as arche-writing); he does not only deduce the necessary deconstructive effects
on the philosophical determination of truth (the undecidability between fiction and the
truth of ideality with respect to the experience of which it would be the trace). In fact,
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61
 Derrida ends up describing, through literature, the necessary and irreducible logic
constituting that universal structure. In this perspective literature assumes a privileged
role with respect to testimony: as it is detached from any link with the true attestation of
a past living present, literature allows one to grasp the necessity of a iterable trace, of
arche-writing as a universal structure of experience, even if it neutralizes its effect once it
is institutionalized. Attesting the chance to refer, in the form of the lived reference of
experience, to a past present of which there is, in fact, no experience, literature attests
also the chance to project towards the future the lived reference to a present of which
there has been no experience and that could always come about:

Perhaps we should insist on this difficult and no doubt decisive point,

in this place of the passive and passionate decision. For in the
hypothetical case of a false testimony, even one that was false through
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and through, and still in the hypothetical case of a lie or a

phantasmatic hallucination, or indeed a literary fiction pure and
simple – well then the event described, the event of reference, will
have taken place, even in its structure of ‘unexperienced’ experience,
as death without death, which one could neither say nor understand
otherwise, that is, through a phantasmacity, according to a
spectrality that is its very law. This spectral law both [à la fois ]
constitutes and structures the abiding [demeurant ] reference in this
narrative; it exceeds the oppositions between real and unreal, actual
and virtual, factual and fictional. The death and the demeurance of
which the narrative speaks have taken place even if they did not take
place in what is commonly called reality. [...] This spectral necessity
– under certain conditions the conditions of the phantasma – allows
what does not arrive to arrive, what one believes does not arrive to
succeed in arriving [arriver à arriver ]. Virtually, with a virtuality that
can no longer opposed to actual factuality [original emphasis].16

Therefore, literature manifests the possibilities of the elaboration of sense of which

arche-writing is a condition. Moreover, it manifests also the necessity to which this
universal structure of experience responds: to interrupt the continuity of homogeneous
living present means to open the possibility of a to-come, that is, the very possibility of
experience, taking place in the order of the necessity of life, or, rather, of the living on:

It is here that false testimony and literary fiction can in truth still testify,
at least as symptom, from the moment that the possibility of fiction has
structured – but with a fracture – what is called real experience. This
constituting structure is a destructuring fracture. It is the condition that
is common to literature and non-literature, to the passion of literature as
well as to this passion tout court to which a literature cannot not refer.
Here, in any case, the border between literature and its other becomes
undecidable. The literary institution has imposed itself; it has also
imposed the rigor of its right to calculate, master, neutralize this
undecidibility, to make as if - another fiction – literature, in its
possibility had not begun before literature, in the very abidance
[demeurance ] of life [original emphasis].17
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62
 The living singularity, in its very coming to the world, is irreducibly exposed to death, it
builds up its memory to conjure death away, saving for the future the trace of this
passion which is unavoidable and, at the same time, never present to experience: as a
condition of an experience inaccessible to experience. Otherwise, there is death.
To conjure death away, through the traces it inscribes in the present without being
experienced, that is, finally, to respond to this beyond or before any metaphisico-
religious illusion, in the interest of life. This is the logic of the living on the iterable trace
and, thus, of our ideal constructions (preceding every assumed distinction between real
and fictive); the logic of diffe´rance at the heart of life, of death, la vie la mort:18

What remains for him of existence, more than this race to death, is this
race of death in view of death in order [ pour ] not to see death coming. In
order [ pour ] not to see death coming means three things in one: so as not to see
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it coming, because one allows it to come and because one does not see it
coming, which is death itself.
To see something coming is to anticipate, to foresee, and to allow to come
without waiting, without preparing oneself, without seeing and knowing
what comes.
Two deaths, one outside, the other inside. Which call each other back to
one another [original emphasis].19

Here, one should restart reading Derrida reading Blanchot and, therefore, Parages,
and, first, Sur-vivre...”
“There is no more time, you must give your paper”.
“Well, it will be for another time”.

Notes

1
Jacques Derrida, Demeur: Maurice Blanchot (Paris:
Galilée, 1998), p.76. ‘This is essential to the
testimonial message that passes into the blood of
reality through the epidermis of fiction’; trans.
Elizabeth Rottenberg, Demeure. Fiction and Testi-
mony (Stanford, California: Stanford University
Press, 2000), p.60. The same book contains
Maurice Blanchot’s short story The Instant of my
Death [1994].
2
Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Le´vinas, trans.
Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press, 1999),
pp.33-4
3
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology [1967], trans.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and
London: John Hopkins University Press, 1997),
p.61. Here Derrida explicitly affirms the methodi-
cal necessity of the transcendental research. It is
necessary to be faithful to phenomenology, at least
up to a certain point. And precisely there where,
on the way of the transcendental research, one
finds arche-writing as the universal structure and
irreducible condition of experience. At this point,
the opposition transcendental/empirical unfolds
itself as an effect of the iterable trace, of the
elaboration of the ideality from the irreducible
conditions of experience and not its cause. Then,
the opposition comes to be un-founded while there
is the possibility of a phenomenological research,
which is effectively immanent to experience and no
longer related to the metaphysics of the transcen-
dental meaning. In this perspective Derrida uses
the term quasi-transcendental to distinguish his
transcendental research from metaphysics. On
transcendental research and universal structures of
experience see Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of
Mirror (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1986).
On the notion of ‘quasi-transcendental’ see
Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Derridabase’, in Geoffrey
Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Derrida [1991]
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993).
4
This perspective is developed in particular in
Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: the two
Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason
alone’[1996], in Acts of Religion, trans. Samuel
parallax
63
 Weber and ed. Gil Anidjar (New York and
London: Routledge, 2002).
5
Jacques Derrida, Demeure, p.29.
6
Jacques Derrida, Demeure, p.32.
7
Jacques Derrida, Demeure, p.33.
8
See Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of
Geometry: an Introduction [1963], trans. John
P. Leavey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1989); Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenom-
ena; and other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs
[1967], trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: North-
western University Press, 1973). I refer to the
deconstruction of phenomenology in my reading of
testimony: Francesco Vitale, ‘Let the Witness
speak: from Arche-writing to the Community to-
Downloaded by [Universidad Nacional Colombia] at 03:15 10 November 2017
Geometry: an Introduction, p.86: ‘Before the “same” is
recognized and communicated among several
individuals, it is recognized and communicated
within the individual consciousness: after quick
and transitory evidence, after a finite and passive
retention vanishes, its sense can be re-produced as
the “same” in the act of recollection; its sense has
not returned to nothingness. In this coincidence of
identity, ideality is announced as such and in general
in an egological subject. [ . . . ] Thus, before being
the ideality of an identical object for other subjects,
sense is this ideality for other moments of the same
subject in a certain way, therefore, intersubjectiv-
ity is first the non-empirical relation of Ego to Ego,
of my present to other presents as such; i.e. as

come’, in Derrida Today, 2:2, 2009. I account for the
ethical and political effects of the quasi-transcen-
dental structure of arche-writing. Now it is time to
explore the description of this structure through
the experience of literature.
9
For the reference to this structure see Jacques
Derrida, Demeure, p.40: ‘What is indispensable,
even for a witness who does not know how to write,
in the common and trivial sense of the word, is that
he be capable of inscribing, tracing, repeating,
remembering, performing, the acts of synthesis
that writing is. Thus he needs some writing power,
at the very least, some possibility of tracing or
imprinting in a given element [e´le´ment quelconque ]’.
10
Jacques Derrida, Demeure, p.41.
11
In this perspective it is possible to find in
Derrida’s late work the trace of a research on the
transcendental performative touching upon the
notions of responsibility, friendship, promise,
testimony, oath and, in particular, trust and faith
(freed from the sacer).
12
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
[1980], trans. A. Smock (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1986), p.41.
13
Jacques Derrida, Demeure, p.49.
14
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster,
p.65.
15
Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of
others and as presents (as past presents). Inter-
subjectivity is the relation of an absolute origin to
other absolute origins, which are always my own,
despite their radical alterity. Thanks to this
circulation of primordial absolutes, the same thing
can be thought through absolutely other moments
and acts. We always come back to the final instants
of this: the unique and essential form of
temporalization [original emphasis]’.
16
Jacques Derrida, Demeure, p.91.
17
Jacques Derrida, Demeure, p.92.
18
See J. Derrida, Writing and Difference [1967],
trans. A. Bass (London and New York: Routledge)
p.253: ‘No doubt life protects itself by repetition,
trace, différance. But we must be wary of this
formulation: there is no life present at first which
would then come to protect, postpone, or reserve
itself in différance. The latter constitutes the
essence of life. Or rather: as différance is not an
essence, as it is not anything, it is not life, if Being is
determined as ousia, presence, essence/existence,
substance or subject. Life must be thought of as
trace before Being may be determined as presence.
This is the only condition on which we can say that
life is death, that repetition and the beyond of the
pleasure principle are native and congenital to that
which they transgress [original emphasis]’.
19
Jacques Derrida, Demeure, p.95.

Francesco Vitale is a permanent Lecturer of Aesthetics and French philosophical

text hermeneutics at the University of Salerno (Italy). He is a member of the
European Foundation of Drawing directed by the artist Valerio Adami. His academic
interests have focused on Derrida’s work since completing a PhD dissertation on
Derrida’s relation to Hegel at the University Federico II in Naples, Italy. Since 2009
he has been working on a research project on Derrida and architecture; he has
recently published the first complete collection of the Derrida’s papers and
interviews on architecture. His essay ‘Let the Witness Speak’ appeared in Derrida
Today, 2:2.

Vitale
64