Critique and Figure

This chapter introduces Jacques Derrida, the philosopher who opened up philosophical hermeneutics to its nonhermeneutical limit and spectacular immanence of its terminology with great tenacity. It reviews the status of philosophical terminology that has been transformed while towing philosophical discourse behind it, changing its history into traces. Discourse awakens to its terminology by opening itself up to the virtuality of a language that, in the immanence of its testimony, has no centering function. This chapter also considers the terminological dimension that blocks the referential univocity sustained by frames and final categories. It explains the how totalization and fetishization are revoked of terminological multiplicity through a common preunderstanding or transcendental.