Abstract

This paper examines how Jacques Derrida appropriates and deepens Immanuel Kant’s transcendental philosophy. In Derrida’s early essay on différance, Kant is conspicuous in his absence. One of the essay’s key aims is to re-think space and time, drawing on the work of Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, and several others to do so. It is therefore curious that Kant is never mentioned, especially because the method and conceptual framework Derrida ends up adopting owes a huge debt to transcendental arguments. Derrida posits a fundamental double- movement of differing and deferral - différance - as the condition for the possibility of anything to be at all, the originary constitution of space and time. It therefore functions as a kind of ‘ultra-transcendental’ condition, as Derrida would say later in his career, that reaches a level of fundamentality that Kant was unable to, making possible not just human experience, but existence as a whole as such.