marius timmann mjaalandthe opportunity of being Itself, submitted to the Other. There is no
self-identity to find. But the investigation of one’s limits, i.e., the limits
of possibility and the necessities confining and restricting one’s
Lebenswelt would in fact establish the first step [pas] and denial [pas] in
defining the limits towards the Other. In that sense Derrida is certainly
right: The only qualitative difference defining a new beginning would
presuppose a limit drawn between the possible and the impossible.
Interior or exterior, abandoned or being there, it would be the limit
towards the Other.
Hence the dissension, the original split or abyss, which is at work in
deconstruction, which produces differences to be analyzed without
offering itself to phenomenological analysis, would also reopen the
abyss of the hidden God to the possibility of self-abandonment in
mercy. The abandonment would be to a God who is already there,
anterior to self-construction, but not there in the sense of total causality
and inductivity. It would announce itself in everyday experiences,
though it remains hidden in its very infinity. This is, in the final
analysis, a question of ontology and topology, of “where” and
“God” and “is” — supposed that God is there, even when “I” is
abandoned.
Read from this point of view, it is also a text about limits, about how
to draw decisive limits, or rather, how to trace the limits which are
already there. This is a critical and confessional task of the Humanities,
their “profession of faith,” as Derrida defines it.^34 Since Husserl,
phenomenology has made aware of a crisis in these disciplines, but
Husserl’s response was an attempt to consume metaphysics by way of
the phenomenological method. Derrida confines himself to the task
of analyzing the crisis. It is a task that is urgent, decisive, and pervasive.
As we have seen, it even goes through Derrida’s philosophy and
becomes the crisis of his own texts.
These limits are not to be drawn out there in the universe, between
an alleged immanence and a questionable transcendence; thus far Der-
rida is certainly right. The limit of transcendence — if there is such a
limit, if there is transcending, transgressing, and excess, if there is decisive
difference and différance — goes through the very act of drawing limits,
- Derrida, L’université sans condition, 78.