Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;The following essay is an introduction into the reading of Derrida. Its general object concerns the relationship between metaphysics and its Other. As such, one can say that it poses the question of thinking, that is the question of the deconstruction of thought and at the same time of a deconstructive thought. This is so because the relationship between metaphysics and its Other, considered in its syntax, reveals itself to be the process of deconstruction, i.e the process of making a difference from metaphysics. In studying this relationship then, we study the process of deconstruction or transgression, the making of a difference from metaphysics and identity by the Other or by differance, and through which difference from 'metaphysics', metaphysics itself is delimited and defined in a certain way. It is thereby revealed that the syntax or matrix of the thought of the Other is still that of the passage between identity and difference, the same and the other etc, but that this passage is no longer operated by identity and in view of identity or towards of reconciliatory unity, as is the case in a thought of identity or within a restricted economy, but that it is instead operated by difference and towards or as difference qua differance. The difference from metaphysics consists in the possibility of this "alternative" or of this other way of operating the passage between identity and difference, by which is affirmed and maintained the 'agon', the 'struggle' or the difference as such qua finitude beyond its possible reconciliation, 'aufhebung' or effacement. ;The opening chapter or 'Apophasis', introducing the wider context of this study, poses a question to the syntax of difference, namely, why must the subversion of metaphysics take the form of the essence of metaphysics, of the essence of essence, the 'origin' of the origin giving, in its effacement, metaphysics? This question is there showned to be fundamentally political