Abstract

Although Derrida has determined experience as always "an experience of presence" in Western metaphysics, a double logic of experience can be shown to determine his deconstruction of the phenomenological concept of experience. Derrida's appeal in his recent works to the notion of experience does not only imply that he has renovated the concept of experience but also that deconstruction has to be understood in terms of experience. Derrida's reading of the notion of experience in Husserl's phenomenology leads us to the notion of the experience of the trace--- a condition of the possibility and of the impossibility of experience understood in terms of presence. By investigating the relation between deconstruction and experience, I point out to the fact that deconstruction subverts the desire for an originary experience and thus opens the way for a new politics of memory. By showing the connection between the experience of the trace as an impossible experience and the aporetic notion of experience, I discuss how Derrida reads the chiasm between ethics and politics in Levinas' philosophy. Finally, I investigate the way in which sexual difference partakes in the notion of aporetic experience and cannot be excluded from it