The Relation of Merleau-Ponty and Blanchot to Derrida

In this paper I have examined the negative phenomenologies of Merleau-Ponty and Blanchot. Negative phenomenologies repress differance as the transcendental and the empirical are repetitions of the same through iterability. I would argue, as I argued previously with Levinas and Ricoeur, that a negative phenomenology or a reversal of phenomenology repeats it rather than managing to escape it.This is because it still proceeds within its metaphysical vocabulary and ontological structure. Merleau-Ponty and Blanchot thus, in inverting and reversing phenomenology, only repeat it by borrowing entirely from its metaphysical vocabulary and structure. Derrida’s phenomenology in place, is a meta-phenomenology in discovering the origin of phenomenology as differance, or the difference between philosophy and non-philosophy, transcendental and empirical. Derrida, as I have argued in the previous chapter on Levinas and Ricoeur, discovers the condition of possibility for phenomenology as the quasi-transcendental, or the interval between the transcendental and empirical which conditions phenomenology in its entirety. The transcendental and empirical are paradoxically identical and non-identical because the difference translates into sameness. The trace, which distinguishes the transcendental and empirical, translates into a difference which is paradoxically not a difference but a sameness. As this paper has argued, the transcendental and empirical distinction is an illusion.