ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines Jacques Derrida’s analysis of Husserlian phenomenology and emphasizes its importance to his notions of originary, transcendental, and arche-violence. It also outlines the notion of an ‘economy of violence,’ which, in the third section, is tied to Derrida’s debate with Levi-Strauss. Derrida undermines the binary opposition to speak of mutual contamination between the rational architectonic determination of meaning and the constitutive acts of a concrete history. Derrida affirms the idea of economy, for which there is an original and inescapable although never static level of violence that must be understood to be beyond good and evil. Derrida’s analysis of violence is conducted through inquiries into the phenomenological tradition. Arche-violence refers to the tension that constitutes arche-writing because, for Derrida, writing neither supposes a purely logical or transcendental level of language, nor a completely empirical, derivate form of discourse.
