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Derrida, famously, challenges what he calls the metaphysics of presence. What is challenging is not the reality of presence as such, but the notion that we can arrive at some pure presence of a thing, a moment, a self that is unmixed with anything other than itself. A pure instant of time that is not filled with past and future; a pure ego that is not a product of training, a pure substance uncontaminated by accidents.
Culler offers a version of Zeno's paradox to explain. If we think of the real as "what is present at any given instant" on the assumption that "the present instant seems a simple, indecomposable absolute," then we will find Zeno's paradox impossible to resolve: "If reality is what is present at any given instant, the arrow produces a paradox. At any given moment it is in a particular spot; it is always in a particular spot and never in motion. We want to insist, quite justifiably, that the arrow is in motion at every instant from the beginning to the end of its flight, yet its motion is never present at any moment of presence." There is a deeper paradox than Zeno's, however, because we can conceive the presence of motion "only insofar as every instant is already marked with the traces of the past and future. Motion can be present, that is to say, only if the present instant is not something given but a product of the relations between past and future. Something can be happening at a given instant only if the instant is already divided within itself, inhabited by the nonpresent."
Motion is thus a vestigium circumincessionis.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, February 15, 2006 at 04:27 PM
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