Philosophy’s Claim to Master Its Own Limit Is the Very Operation That Produces the Uncontrollable Margin

Derrida opens Margins of Philosophy not with a thesis but with a typographical experiment: the “Tympan” essay runs in a split column, its left side philosophically rigorous, its right side a meandering citation from Michel Leiris on the cavernous voice and the phonograph, the two texts never fusing yet never fully separable. This layout is not decorative. It enacts the book’s central discovery: philosophy has always insisted that it thinks its own other, that it “controls the margin of its volume and thinks its other,” yet this very insistence is what blinds it. The margin is not a blank virginity surrounding the philosophical text—“beyond the philosophical text there is not a blank, virgin, empty margin, but another text, a weave of differences of forces without any present center of reference.” Philosophy’s limit, Derrida insists, is not a line that can be drawn, crossed, and then dialectically reabsorbed. It is a double membrane, struck from both sides, and its obliqueness—like the anatomical tympanum stretched at an angle to increase the surface of vibration—is precisely what philosophy cannot straighten without ceasing to hear. This is the founding gesture of the entire collection: to show that the Hegelian Aufhebung, the sublation that claims to interiorize every outside, always leaves a remainder it cannot digest. To “luxate the philosophical ear” is not to oppose philosophy frontally (“in all the forms of anti-”) but to inscribe an asymmetry into its system that it cannot reappropriate. Wolfgang Giegerich, who engages Derrida directly in The Soul’s Logical Life, charges that deconstruction amounts to “endlessly repeatable human activity” substituting for genuine crossing—an infinite deferral that never catches sight of the wilderness. Yet Giegerich’s critique, however penetrating, presupposes exactly the metaphysics of presence and center that Derrida has shown to be philosophy’s self-protective fantasy. The tension between them is not resolvable; it is generative.

The Concept of Metaphor Cannot Escape Its Own Metaphoricity, and This Is Not a Paradox but the Condition of Philosophical Discourse

“White Mythology,” the longest and most technically relentless essay in the collection, tracks the fate of metaphor from Aristotle through Du Marsais, Fontanier, Nietzsche, and Hegel. Derrida’s argument is surgical: the concept of metaphor—the distinction between proper and improper, literal and figurative, sensible and intelligible—is itself a philosophical product. Any attempt to construct a “general taxonomy of metaphors” or a “metaphorology” that would dominate philosophical figurality from outside is doomed because “its instruments belonging to its field, philosophy is incapable of dominating its general tropology and metaphorics. It could perceive its metaphorics only around a blind spot or central deafness.” This is not the familiar claim that all language is metaphorical. That claim, Derrida shows, merely extends “to every element of discourse, under the name of metaphor, what classical rhetoric considered a quite particular figure.” Nietzsche’s gesture of calling all concepts worn-out metaphors is itself trapped in the schema it denounces. The deeper point is structural: the opposition between the sensible vehicle and the intelligible tenor—the very architecture of the metaphor concept—is sediment deposited by the history of metaphorical language. There is no Archimedean position from which to survey philosophy’s tropology, because the surveyor’s instruments are already tropes. For depth psychology, this has direct consequences. James Hillman’s insistence in Re-Visioning Psychology that pathologizing “cracks the normative cement of our daily realities into new shapes” and that “truth is the mirror, not what’s in it or behind it, but the very mirroring process itself” operates in a remarkably parallel register. Both Derrida and Hillman recognize that the literalizing gesture—treating concepts as transparent windows onto a stable referent—is precisely what kills psychological and philosophical reflection. But where Hillman trusts the image’s capacity to “carry events to an incurable possibility” and ultimately to death as meaning, Derrida refuses to let any image settle into a stable presence. The proximity is real; the divergence is decisive.

“The Ends of Man” Exposes the Magnetic Attraction Between Humanism and the Thinking of Being

The 1968 essay “The Ends of Man,” delivered during the convulsions of May in France, is Derrida’s most concentrated engagement with Heidegger. Its argument turns on a structural ambiguity: “man is that which is in relation to his end, in the fundamentally equivocal sense of the word”—both finitude and telos, limit and purpose. Even Heidegger, who dismantled metaphysical humanism more rigorously than anyone, remains caught in what Derrida calls “a kind of magnetic attraction” toward the proper of man. Dasein may not be the man of metaphysics, but the “proximity” Heidegger establishes between Dasein and Being reproduces a humanist privilege at a deeper level. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, similarly, critiques empirical anthropologism only to affirm a transcendental humanism governed by the teleological infinity of reason. Derrida reads both as demonstrating that the “we” of philosophical discourse—“we men,” “we rational beings”—cannot be simply abandoned; it must be deconstructed from within, which means tracing how its apparent self-evidence is produced by the very metaphysical structures it claims to ground. Giegerich’s counter-charge that Derrida “contents himself with intellectual possibilities” and “systematically ignores the whole other half of reality, one’s staking oneself,” names a genuine limitation—but it also reveals how depth psychology’s demand for “showing presence” is itself a metaphysical commitment that Margins puts under pressure. The question is not whether Derrida or Jung is right about whether one must stake one’s whole being; the question is what philosophical apparatus produces the opposition between intellectual analysis and existential commitment in the first place.

Margins of Philosophy remains indispensable not because it offers a method or a doctrine, but because it performs, in ten essays of escalating rigor, the demonstration that philosophy cannot secure its own borders—and that every attempt to think “outside” philosophy (whether through psychology, linguistics, or political action) that does not reckon with this structural impossibility will be, as Derrida warns, “called back to order” by “misconstrued philosophical machines” operating a tergo. For anyone working in depth psychology, where the relation between concept and image, literal and figurative, ego and soul is the daily medium of thought, this book provides the most unsparing account of why those distinctions can never be stabilized—and why the refusal to stabilize them is not nihilism but the condition of continued thinking.