Abstract
It is not common to find significance across the thought of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze although there have been moments where some have sought to locate such lines of flight. One such line has been located in the region of an ethical impulse in their affirmation towards a future. While both Derrida and Deleuze are resistant to the teaching of the history of philosophy, clearly their different trajectories can be rhetorically folded and revealed. These differences might be too quickly summed up as, on the Deleuzianhand, an innocent delight in doing philosophy afresh opposed to the Derridean cautionary one that discloses respect for the metaphysical legacy that has led to his reflexive awareness of his writing. Derrida himself even affirms this Deleuzian ‘innocence’ in philosophy as we hear in his 1995 eulogy to Deleuze: “Yes, we will have all loved philosophy, who can deny it? But, it is true—he said it—Deleuze was the one among all of this “generation” who did/made [faisait] it the most gaily, the most innocent” (Derrida 2001:193). This affirms Derrida’s respect of all philosophers worthy of carrying such a name and particularly in light of this eulogy titled “I’m going to have to Wander All Alone” which evokes ‘now’ the remarkable proximity he locates between his own work and that of Deleuze. This paper aims to draw both philosophers into proximity with respect to how each present a relation to time. Further, in doing so, the attempt will be to reveal how in their reconceptualisation of time, an ethics towards a future binds their thought. In this presentation, this ethico-political future is located in Deleuze’s concept of the event and the syntheses of time described in Difference and Repetition and Derrida’s concept of the gift and justice with respect to his notion of ‘time out of joint’ (Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, Specters of Marx) that leads to a beyond-representation of time. A critical question that underpins the between of Deleuzian and Derridean concepts of time is how far removed or beyond Martin Heidegger’s ecstatic temporality has either gone? It will be their different systems of language (poetics as such), including Heidegger’s, which will here come to provide critical grounds for approaching questions of proximity and ethics between affirmations of time and being-in-the-world.
