Rebeca Pérez León

This article advances three arguments. First, understanding Derrida’s différance and the qualification ‘quasi-transcendental’ requires retracing the path leading to Derrida’s historical methodological schema. Second, it is methodologically and historically necessary to begin this path with the reactivation of Husserl’s criticism and reduction of all forms of empiricism, including historicism. This reactivation grants phenomenology a structural role in Derrida’s philosophy and challenges historicist interpretations of Derrida’s work. Third, the irreducibility of writing at the core of phenomenology’s ultimate transcendental experience of phōnē reduces the tradition of metaphysics, distinguishing its inessential elements - presence in all its forms as absolute beginning and end of sense - from its essential elements - writing as the essential production of signification to infinity unrestricted by truth and objectivity. This irreducibility is quasi-transcendental because it makes the phenomenological edifice possible only as a symbolic representation representing nothing, but impossible as the fulfilment of the subject’s intention in an intuition.

This essay advances the thesis that Derrida’s ethics consists in the practice of philosophical responsibility. I contend that philosophical responsibility is the historical and ethical task of establishing a critical relation to one’s tradition which deliberately avoids passively and naively taking it for granted by questioning its origin and revealing its historicity. Further, I show that Derrida learns the task of philosophical responsibility from Husserl’s own version of philosophical responsibility, which he later transforms with the help of Husserl’s own methodological tools. I maintain that the difference between Husserl’s and Derrida’s respective tasks is the injunction they are responding to and, concomitantly, the sense each gives to historicity. Whereas Husserl is responding to the principle of reason so as to reawaken the historicity of universal truth and its foundation, that is, the telos of Reason, Derrida is responding for the principle of reason with the purpose of disclosing the historicity of signification – différance – whose operation reduces the telos of Reason.

This article critically examines Hütter-Almerigi’s defence of Rorty’s strong subjectivity and the possibility of complete detachment from the normativity of public language. She presents two arguments: although public normativity is necessary for a new vocabulary to be recognised, it is unnecessary at the moment of its emergence; and a robust subjectivity and normative detachment advance Rorty’s aim to arouse political action and redescribe liberal culture. I contend that normative detachment is unnecessary and impossible for language creation, for triangulation conserves and transforms language simultaneously and is a condition of private languages. I also question the direct political goals Hütter-Almerigi attributes to Rorty, proposing instead that his cultural politics seeks to indirectly cultivate a metaphysics-free sense of community through vocabulary redescription.