Abstract

My work, then, first introduces and then repeats, repeatedly, this circular activity whereby nothing is ever indicated but which is, itself, as it is occurring, all that can ever be had of life in the present. ;The second section argues that Hegel's circular determination of truth, whereby activity inherent to the present moment is alone valorized, becomes the inescapable "point de depart" for all subsequent philosophical thought, and more specifically that Derrida's own work can never be anything more than a meticulous repetition of the Hegelian circle, itself already a repetition: the constant repetition of presence in a repetitive chain of present moments. Value is awarded exclusively to this act of repetition whereby alone, "une presence pleine," can be achieved and experienced. Reading and writing are conceived as acts which can only be experienced by the reader or writer while he is in the process of performing them. Recourse to representation, historical determinations, is absolutely denied. ;This work has two distinct sections. In the first I critique the efforts of two avowedly reductivist thinkers, Descartes and Husserl, and in so doing, I reappropriate, in large measure, Derrida's strategy of "deconstruction." Husserl's attempt at radical and total reduction is evaluated and finally judged insufficient, and a complete reduction to "nothing" is proposed in its place. At this point the figures of "le o" and "le o tr." are introduced. Precedence for such putting into circulation of nothing is found in Hegel, where repeatedly and insistently philosophical truth is posited as a "cercle vicieux" incapable of maintaining itself in representative form. The circle can have no beginning and no end, no empirically differentiable parts. Rather, it only exists in the activity of its own autonomous and irreferential circulation