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In this chapter I seek to highlight in a preliminary manner one of the core major differences within continental philosophy in regard to the philosophy of time — differences that I associate with, respectively, phenomenology and post-structuralism. This tête-à-tête concerns the connection between such philosophies of time and metaphilosophical and ethico-political normativity. Indeed, it is no coincidence that in some of the now canonical rejections of phenomenology offered by Deleuze and Derrida, the most telling and repeatedly expressed objections are about time. In Speech and Phenomena, for example, Derrida shows that the emphasis upon the centrality of the living-present in Husserl's work is intimately related to what Husserl calls phenomenology's "principle of all principles: that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimising source of cognition' (1982, p. 44). As Husserl goes on to say, everything that presents itself to consciousness is taken in the manner that it presents itself, and Derrida has questioned phenomenology for its tacit dependence on a "now' moment, and a temporal immediacy of that which presents itself, remarking that "in the last analysis, what is at stake is … the privilege of the actual present, the now' (1973, pp. 23–4). But to put Derrida's concerns in a more general context, the worry is that phenomenological descriptions of the experience of time focus, predominantly if not exclusively, on the manner in which time gathers, or conjoins rather than disjoins.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137410276_8

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