Erinnerung, Retrait, Absolute Reflection: Hegel and Derrida Wendell Kisner DePaul University In this essay I show that Jacques Derrida not only mistakenly reads the Hegelian text in terms of reflection, but that his own way of thinking could be characterized from a Hegelian perspective as itself reflective. For this I will not focus upon those writings of Derrida's which are explicitly "about" Hegel, nor will I compare those places in both the Derridian and Hegelian corpora which seem to present a contiguity in an at least superficial resemblance between concepts, such as Hegelian difference(Unterschied) vis a vis Derridian difference. 1 Rather, I will focus upon one of Derrida's texts which indicate his own contributions to the field of thinking and writing and the directions for inquiry initiated in his work, as well as his engagement with Hegel. Such a text is his masterful essay White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy, 2 a writing overtly concerned with the difficulties posed by metaphoricity in the text of philosophy and the attempt in the latter to domesticate and "interiorize" its tropic reserve or condition of possibility within the concept of metaphor itself, which turns out to be a philosopheme. The problems of philosophy are posed in terms of such mastery and interiorization. Since my concern in this essay is to problematize this kind of reading by showing that it trades off of reflective distinctions, I will not here attempt a positive philosophical account of metaphoricity per se. Indeed, Derrida will indicate what he takes to be the conditions of the impossibility of such an account, but it is precisely his reasons for this impossibility that I find problematic in terms of reflection. 1 In the White Mythology, Derrida has in effect deconstructed what is ordinarily taken for deconstruction. Specifically, what is questioned and problematized is precisely the strategy that attempts to show the irreducibility of metaphor in the text of philosophy, as if one could adopt a stance from which to launch this kind of critique without presupposing and tacitly being in complicity with the very philosophical stance toward metaphor that it attempts to criticize. This complicity shows up most noticeably in the very concept of metaphor, itself a philosopheme in terms of which philosophy has, we are told, attempted to suppress its own dependence upon that which exceeds meaning per se. There will always remain a "stratum of 'tutelary' tropes" or a "layer of 'primary' philosophemes" which "gets 'carried away' each time that one of its products - here, the concept of metaphor - attempts in vain to include under its own law the totality of the field to which the product belongs."(DM 219) Thus Derrida purports "to recognize in principle the condition for the impossibility of such a project" of a "future metaphorics" that would adequately account for metaphor in the philosophical text.(Ibid.) One might call this a negative critique of pure metaphor. But throughout this essay, and indeed throughout much of Derrida's work, there continually appear certain tacit assumptions which lead him in a particular direction, assumptions which it is not completely obvious that one should or need make. The most notable name that comes up in this regard is that of Hegel, for whom Derrida's assumptions would for the most part appear as an insistence upon a reflective way of thinking. Derrida regards the Hegelian movement of Aufhebung (which he translates releve) as a movement of interiorization through the resolution of metaphysical oppositions (such as nature/spirit, sensible/intelligible, etc.), a resolution that conceals a necessary suppression - necessary in order that the privileged member of such an opposition subsume the other as its "truth" and meaning, thereby "interiorizing" it. This interiorization is Erinnerung, a memory that "produces signs, interiorizing them in elevating, suppressing, and conserving the sensory exterior."(DM 226) The simultaneous negation/preservation of Aufhebung is read as elevation/suppression/conservation - Hegelian negation becomes a suppression, a concept which leaves room for an irreducible (unsubsumable) alterity, an exteriority that remains outside the Hegelian system. 1 For a comparison of Hegel and Derrida that is rather oversimplified and less than satisfactory from both Derridian and Hegelian perspectives, see James L. Marsh, The Play of Difference/Differance in Hegel and Derrida, in The Owl of Minerva, vol.21, no.2(Spring 1990), pp. 145-153. 2 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, pp. 207-271 (hereafter cited as 'DM'). 1