To appear in Research in Phenomenology, 2018 1 Pietro Terzi Fondazione Collegio San Carlo / Université Paris Nanterre “The Very Place of Apparition”: Derrida on Husserl’s Concept of Noema * Abstract: In Specters of Marx, Derrida suggests that the most fundamental condition of phenome- nality lies in the ambiguous status of the noema, defined as an intentional and non-real component of Erlebnis, neither “in” the world nor “in” consciousness. This “irrealty” of the noematic correlate is conceived by Derrida as the origin of sense and experience. Already in his Of Grammatology, Derrida maintained that the difference between the appearing and the appearance, between the world and the lived experience, is the condition of all other differ- ences. Unfortunately, Derrida limits himself to few self-evident remarks, without further elaborating. The aim of this paper is twofold: on the one hand, to contextualize Derrida’s interpretation of the noema from a theoretical and historical perspective; on the other hand, to show its effects on the early moments of Derrida’s philosophy. The result will shed light on a neglected issue in the relationship between deconstruction and phenomenology. Keywords: Derrida, Husserl, Noema, Phenomenology 1. Introduction The relationship between Derrida and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl has been at the center of a great deal of excellent scholarship over the last decades. 1 The historical background of this confrontation is now clearly defined, as well as its main theoretical stakes. In this paper, I would like to focus on a specific aspect of the Derridean reading of phenomenology that has been quite overlooked by scholars, namely the question of the appearing as such, of the transcendental con- ditions of phenomenality, that Derrida briefly addresses only a few times in his oeuvre. This issue is strictly connected to his interpretation of the Husserlian con- * This is the final draft of the article. The published version is available upon request. 1 See Vincenzo Costa, La generazione della forma. La fenomenologia e il problema della genesi in Husserl e in Derrida (Milano: Jaca Book 1996); Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (Bloomington-Indianapolis, Indiana University Press 2002); Joshua Kates, Essential History: Jacques Derrida and the Development of Deconstruction (Evanston, Ill.: Northwest- ern University Press 2005); Paola Marrati, Genesis and Trace. Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger, transl. Simon Sparks (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2005); Françoise Dastur, Décon- struction et phénoménologie. Derrida en débat avec Husserl and Heidegger (Paris: Hermann 2016).