Infinity and the Relation

Abstract

In Double Session, Jacques Derrida, commenting on Jean-Pierre Richard's use as examples of the themes the blank and the fold in the work of Mallarme to demonstrate the ideally exhaustive and totalizing possibilities of thematic criticism,1insists in resistance to this demonstration that, despite the apparent richness of these examples: What one tends not to see . . . is that these textual effects are rich with kind of poverty.... One does not see this because one thinks one is seeing themes in the very spot where the non-theme, that which cannot become theme. . . is ceaselessly re-marking itself that is, disappearing. (DIS 251) On Derrida's account, there is certain optimism in Richard's identification of critical possibilities in the infinite field of the an optimism that persists despite Richard's recognition of the factual limits that prevent the encompassing of such field as well as of the problems posed by the diacritical character of language. Derrida, in by now familiar move, identifies this optimism with the absolutizing pretensions of the metaphysical tradition, and, most explicitly, with Hegel's Aufhebung. This identification is not gratuitous, for on the basis of the passage just cited, in few pages Derrida offers an account of infinity that purports to supplant, as both its possibility and its impossibility, the metaphysical tradition's conception of infinity, the highest expression of which as Derrida understands it is located in Hegel's philosophy. Briefly, in the ceaseless remarking of the blank, of the non-theme, Derrida locates structurally necessary finitude at work in the infinite field of the supplementary difference, a certain inexhaustibility which cannot be classed in the categories of richness, intentionality, or horizon (DIS 250). It is this supplementary difference, to which Richard's optimism is blind, that according to Derrida renders any totalizing project like Richard's impossible. As thus characterized, this finite infinity is nothing other than Differance and it is thus necessary, if we are to adequately account for the particulars of Derrida's thought, to come to some understanding of the supplementation he offers to the classical notion of infinity. Unfortunately, the discussion of infinity in Double Session, falling as it does somewhat outside of the stated scope of the essay (cf. DIS 250), is somewhat curtailed. Rodolphe Gasche, in his essay Nontotalization Without Spuriousness: Hegel and Derrida on the Infinite, has attempted to fill in some of the detail of the analysis whose conclusion is presented in Double Session, paying particular attention to the Hegelian contexts of Derrida's understanding of infinity.3 There is another context, however, that I would argue plays significant and substantial role not only in Derrida's understanding of infinity but in the entirety of his philosophy, but which, in connection to the question under discussion here, has received little attention. The context to which I refer is Derrida's reading of Husserl, and in particular, his discussion of Husserl's use of the Idea in the Kantian sense.4 Despite the generally acknowledged importance of to Derrida's thought, little attention has been paid to the Husserlian contexts of Derrida's understanding of infinity. One possible explanation for this is that in the discussion of infinity in Double Session, Derrida refers to Husserl only once. In footnote, noting Richard's identification of his project as phenomenology of the theme, he connects his reservations about Richard's optimism to questions posed to in his Introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry (DIS 248 n. 3). The necessity of Husserl to the discussion of Double Session becomes more evident,however- when we note first that in his essay Pit and the Pyramid, Derrida insists on the continuity of the analysis of Hegel articulated there with his earlier analysis of Husserl's Logical Investigations. …