Writing, Sedimentations, Differance. On the Aporology of History.

Derrida’s Introduction to Husserl’s 1936, The Origin of Geometry sought to reveal in “all of its enigmatic depth” the “space of a transcendental historicity,” that is, deploy the inherent paradoxality at work within the very project of a genetic phenomenology which is wholly concentrated and oriented on posing the question in direction of the “origin,” and thus of the “originary foundation” Urstiftung for the formation of meaning in and through history. Indeed, and following Husserl’s genetic approach, Derrida will engage phenomenology in explicating both how idealities have entered in history for the first time and how, by this “first time,” these have constituted themselves as omnitemporal. Always underlying the radicality of Husserl’s position, Derrida also purports the need for phenomenology to deploy both a concrete and creative, foundational and innovative genesis for and of meaning, and thus a transcendental historicity. Derrida’s reading thus reveals a mutual contamination between the transcendental and the empirical which at once informs and overwhelms the sedimentations of meaning in history and thereby deploys how and why the role and the function of writing always operates both within the frame of a transcendental questioning and already beyond this transcendental horizon. Here thus lies one of the central aporetic effects of Derrida’s reading of the role and the function of writing in Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry: writing is seen as always essential in constituting a transcendental historicity and as already secondary within a constituted history. Otherwise said: writing always constitutes the sedimentations, the possibility and the actuality, of meaning in history and already shows itself as a sediment in history. Following the role and the function of writing which Derrida will radicalise and aporetise in Husserl’s 1936 text, and where the deconstructive idea of supplementarity will unquestionably arise, we will, in turn, develop what we would call here an aporology of history where the question of singularity––singularity of historical “events” spurring on an aporetic “logic” of spectrality incessantly awakening a surviving responsibility––can be reformulated and shifted from “Where lies and from where arises the constitution of history; how may this constitution sediment itself as and in history?” to “What remains or what is left, which sedimentations, of history from history to yet come to history?”