Experience of the non-present

Our present experience of time has to do with something that is not present, or one could say, is present in the form of non-presence – like a ghost or a spectre.

Derrida speaks of “the experience of the non-present”. Phrased in the shakespearian terms used in Spectres of Marx, time is always out of joint. There is no presence that is not involved with the future and the past, the air is always full of ghosts. This of course holds for every point in time. Time is always already out of joint, not present to itself. The concept of “Messianicity” tries to formulate this out-of-joint structure.In his text Marx & Sons, Derrida tries to clarify why this Messianicity is “without” Messianism, and he names two conditions that this conception should exclude. It should exclude (firstly) the memory of a determinate historical revelation, whether Jewish or Jewish-Christian, and (secondly) it should exclude a determinate Messiah-figure.

Thus, the messianic for Derrida names a universal structure of experience, a structure, he says at one point, that functions as a quasi-transcendental ground for all particular Messianisms. Let me read to you a passage from Marx & Sons:“The figures of Messianism would have to be (…) deconstructed as ‘religious’, ideological, or fetischistic formations, whereas Messianicity without Messianism remains, for its part, undeconstructible, like justice. It remains undeconstructible because the movement of any deconstruction presupposes it.

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