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John Llewelyn

pp. 273-287

in: John Sallis, Giuseppina Moneta, Jacques Taminiaux (eds), The Collegium Phaenomenologicum, the first ten years, Berlin, Springer, 1988

Abstract

On the one hand and on the other hand. This is a pattern one finds in and among the writings of Derrida. It is a pattern one used to find in leading articles of The Times of London. In The Times the outcome was either a neutral, middle of the road compromise or a dissolution of an apparent conflict through the exposure of an equivocation in the terms in which the views of the parties to the dispute were expressed. This essay will come round to considering whether it is a meeting of extremes of this latter sort that we find in the essay by Derrida which is entitled "Violence and Metaphysics' and which ends with the citation of the words "Extremes meet' from "perhaps the most Hegelian of modern novelists' (WD 153; 228).¹ We can assert at the start that if Derrida subscribes to the idea that extremes meet, he certainly does not subscribe to the idea that they meet in some neutral middle ground, for example a higher or deeper synthesis such as is posited by the aforementioned Hegelianism.

Cited authors

Derrida Jacques