experience/mediation

So we have the binary oppositions, present/represented, direct/mediated.

From a Deconstructive persepective, we would then have to demonstrate that the second, apparently secondary, supplementary term is actually primary – presence emerges as an effect of representation and direct experience as an effect of mediation.

Strictly speaking this requires a third term, one that is not simply caught up in the initial binary relations – within the Derridean canon: writing, differance, the trace, the supplement, etc.

This is all very well, but tends to position the first term – presence, direct experience – as the enemy, as something that must be obliterated. Of course this represents a crude and unfair reading of the Deconstructive tradition – in the case of Derrida particularly, one that fails to take account of his intimate concern with the intricacies of being as a complex field and as a space of otherness. But nonetheless the problem remains that experience itself seems infinitely other and distant. The field of writing appears much closer.

The concern now is to permit experience – the complexity of experience – to somehow make a return. This entails recognising a work of mediation within experience without making experience altogether disappear.

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