Violence is a permanent and central feature of Jacques Derrida’s philoso- phy. 1 While various commentators 2 have noted the role it plays in his later works, in this chapter, I argue that these build on his early notions of ‘originary violence,’ 3 ‘arche-violence,’ 4 and ‘transcendental violence.’ 5 These appear explicitly and predominantly in his analyses of Levinas in the essay ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ 6 and of Claude Lévi-Strauss in Of Grammatology. 7 In both, Derrida outlines a certain violence of meaning, which describes a condition of possibility of meaning in general that is always unstable in its archic status. Little work has been done to bring these texts together to excavate the notions of originary, arche-violence, and transcendental violence inher- ent to them, 8 with even less done to connect Derrida’s analyses on these issues to his earlier works on Husserl’s phenomenology. 9 I argue, how- ever, that the relationship between violence and origin is found in Derri- da’s analysis of the normative structure of Husserlian phenomenological discourse 10 with this providing the ‘ground’ for Derrida’s subsequent crit- ical readings of Levinas 11 and Lévi-Strauss. 12 Through his engagements with Husserl, Levinas, and Lévi-Strauss, Derrida unfolds a philosophical strategy 13 that aims to question the very possibility of fully determining what is right and wrong, good and evil, violent and non-violent, and so on. If violence is originary, as Derrida concludes, then any attempt to criticize it must always be based on the arche-violence of meaning, with the consequence that any planned escape from violence and hence a pure non-violence is simply not possible. Derrida’s point is that, rather than thinking in terms of a violence/non-violence dichotomy, we must recog- nize that violence lies at the ‘foundation’ of all meaning but takes on dif- ferent configurations. There is then an ‘economy of violence’ 14 in which violence is understood in terms of differential and multiple becomings rather than static and binary categories and oppositions. To outline this, the chapter is divided into four sections: The first briefly outlines Derrida’s analysis of Husserlian phenomenology and emphasizes its importance to his notions of originary, transcendental, and arche-violence, before the second section develops this through Derrida’s 8 The Original Polemos Phenomenology and Violence in Jacques Derrida Valeria Campos-Salvaterra 15032-2130d-1pass-r03.indd 148 8/23/2018 7:20:42 AM