Being in the Present: Derrida and Irigaray on the Metaphysics of Presence

The Problem of the Present

In his essay "Différance," Derrida suggests that "the privilege granted to the present . . . is the ether of metaphysics."¹ And in "Ousia and Grammé," he expresses this same idea, noting that "the entire history of philosophy" has "been authorized by the 'extraordinary right' of the present" and that "from Parmenides to Husserl, the privilege of the present has never been put into question."² All temporal modes are ultimately thought in the form of presence (ousia): "The past and the future are always determined as past presents or future presents" (OG 34). Being is "already determined as being-present" (OG 47), yet this determination, according to Derrida, remains unthematized within the tradition.

The question of time has thus always been inscribed into the question of being, yet being has also precisely been understood as exempt from time. We know, from Hegel, that time "is the being which, in that it is, is not, and in that it is not, is."³ The (temporal) present can, in fact, never be captured or maintained. Its very nature is to pass away, to be negated in the same moment as it comes into being. Within the framework of time, the present is that which never itself is as present—this is the riddle that has fascinated and troubled all those who have taken upon themselves the task of understanding the nature of time. It drove Aristotle to wonder if there really is such a thing as time: "Some of it is past and no longer exists, and the rest is future and does not yet exist; and time . . . is entirely made up of the no-longer and not-yet; and how can we conceive of that which is composed of non-existents sharing in existence in any way?"⁴ Saint Augustine puts the problem similarly: If "the present is time only by reason of the fact that it moves on to become the past, how can we say that even the present is, when the reason why it is is that it is not to be? In other words, we cannot rightly say that time is, except by reason of its impending state of not being."⁵ The task of classical ontology, we might say, has been to "save" presence from this condition of always already becoming absent. Being, to put it simply, has been conceptualized as exempt from and immune to time: if the sensible realm is subject to change, the intelligible is posited as a realm beyond becoming and change. This is what is commonly described as a metaphysics of presence.

For Derrida, questions of time and presence have always been intimately linked to a certain logic of identity. As Martin Hägglund has pointed out, we have, according to Derrida, come to subsume "time under a non-temporal presence in order to secure the philosophical logic of identity."⁶ Selfsame being (identity as presence in itself) can only be thought and grasped if exempt from the succession of time. Since time never truly is, being must be posited as somehow other than time, immune to time. This would be the "primordial present" that Derrida, throughout his work, has given critical attention to.

In a deconstructive move, Derrida therefore posits différance as that which never is and never can be. Différance, he asserts, cannot be thought "on the basis of the present, or of the presence of the present," but, rather, must be articulated in terms of a "past that has never been present" (Dr 21). It not only escapes presence and essence as such but, more importantly for Derrida, also "threatens the authority . . . of the presence of the thing itself in its essence" (Dr 25-26). One way of characterizing this move is to say that Derrida replaces primordial presence with primordial difference-deferral.⁷ Différance is thus one of many Derridean terms designated to undermine classical ontology: he asserts that the "determination of Being as presence or as beingness . . . is interrogated by the thought of différance" (Dr 21). Put differently...