Reconstituting différance as history through Derrida’s reduction of Husserlian phenomenology

This article advances three arguments. First, understanding Derrida’s différance and the qualification ‘quasi-transcendental’ requires retracing the path leading to Derrida’s historical methodological schema. Second, it is methodologically and historically necessary to begin this path with the reactivation of Husserl’s criticism and reduction of all forms of empiricism, including historicism. This reactivation grants phenomenology a structural role in Derrida’s philosophy and challenges historicist interpretations of Derrida’s work. Third, the irreducibility of writing at the core of phenomenology’s ultimate transcendental experience of phōnē reduces the tradition of metaphysics, distinguishing its inessential elements - presence in all its forms as absolute beginning and end of sense - from its essential elements - writing as the essential production of signification to infinity unrestricted by truth and objectivity. This irreducibility is quasi-transcendental because it makes the phenomenological edifice possible only as a symbolic representation representing nothing, but impossible as the fulfilment of the subject’s intention in an intuition.