Formal Contamination

Abstract

The following discussion will employ the concept of in articulating Derrida's general argument for contamination, which is said to result from the workings of differance. That the general motif of is important to Derrida's account has been suggested previously, most forcefully in Henry Staten's study Wittgenstein and Derrida, where in tracing the employment of the concept from Aristotle through Kant and Husserl, he notes: In all its manifestations, is the transphenomenal boundary of the phenomenon by virtue of which the phenomenon becomes accessible to knowledge. It is the common element in thing, thought, and word that makes them able to line up with each other in truth. Thus is, as Derrida says, the of presence, of the accessibility to the knower of the known. is the a priori, the necessary predetermination or bounding of the of a possible cognition, whether as predetermining the experiencing through the of the experienced (realism), or the experienced through the of the experiencing (transcendental idealism), or both together (as is perhaps the case in Husserl's phenomenology). From the deconstructive point of view what matters is not where the is ultimately located, but the of or form-ingeneral, and the relation between the concept of and that of an object-in-general.2 Moreover, as he goes on to point out, what characterizes philosophical thought as such is its affirmation of self-identity deployed through the principle of contradiction, which amounts to an orchestrated ' fighting against the flux,' looking for a necessary boundary against formlessness.3 In reference to the employment of the principle in Aristotle's Metaphysics,4 and the tradition generally, he suggests: Here the principle of contradiction invades the inmost recesses of thought, becomes the origin and wellspring which thought cannot get behind or under or beyond, because it seems that it is the generative principle out of which any thought comes into being. is the horismos, or boundary of definition, that makes an object be what it is and not anything or everything else, the bulwark that holds it together against the indefinite, and, correlatively, the guarantee of the unity and self-identity of thought.5 Within this context, Staten understands Derrida's project to consist in the sustained attempt to draw attention to the role of the outside within the hermetically characterized concept of maintained by the tradition. The notion of a constitutive outside is the deconstructive alternative to the fundamental philosophical concept of or essence-that is, of unity and self-identity as the most general and inviolable boundaries . . . of being and knowledge. As the admission of the not-itself into the citadel of the as-such, this notion appears to open the way to the flux.6 In support of this interest in the concept of form, Staten appropriately refers to Derrida's early essay Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language, as an important resource. There, in passages also cited by Staten, we read: Whether it is a question of [Husserl] determining eidos in opposition to Platonism, or (Form) (in the problematic of formal logic and ontology) or morphe (in the problematic of its transcendental constitution and in its relation with hyle) in opposition to Aristotle, the force, vigilance, and efficacy of the critique remain intrametaphysical .... As soon as we utilize the concept of form-even if to criticize an other concept of form-we inevitably have recourse to the self-evidence of a kernel of meaning.... Moreover, it does not suffice to say that form has a meaning for us, a center of self-evidence, or that its essence as such is given for us: in truth, this concept cannot be, and never could be, dissociated from the concept of appearing, of meaning, of self-evidence, of essence. Only a is self-evident, only a has or is an essence, only a presents itself as such. …