On the Quasi-Transcendental: Temporality and Political Epistemology in Derrida’s Glas
Chapter 3 articulates how constitutive exclusion both grounds and troubles borders and foundations, acting as the simultaneous condition of possibility and impossibility for the body whose border it draws. I investigate this quasi-transcendental character through an analysis of Derrida’s reading of Hegel in Glas, and in his 1971–1972 course, “La famille de Hegel.” Derrida argues that the speculative dialectic of the Logic is distinguished from the empirical differences of nature through an account of gender produced as “natural” but which secures the gender of language and power. Relying on Derrida’s analysis of Antigone/Antigone, I flesh out the economy and retroactive temporality of constitutive exclusion. I give an account of transcendental as a performative role, and argue that retroactive temporality, in combination with the multiplicity diagnosed in Chapter 2, indicates that political bodies and agency are secured through a sedimented history of multiple constitutive exclusions.