ABSTRACT
Why should one propose that Derrida solves problems in other philosophers, when the usual story is that Derrida problematizes their so-called solutions? If solutions find out what things are, then Derrida’s undecidabilities obviously cannot count as solutions. But once philosophers (from Hegel onwards) proved that things undergo self-undermining processes, different sorts of discoveries have to count as solutions. Once Derrida has shown that the now is the impossible simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, and that the instant must first return from a future that will have been its past, we can no longer take these discoveries as mere challenges to the classical view that the now is present when it appears. There is no point taking the latter as the thesis and saying that Derrida problematizes it. To be sure, Derrida is not simply deciding on a new thesis about the now, since questions about whether the now does or does not have a given property (e.g., singularity, or existence in the present) are by his argument undecidable. But if an analysis of the best philosophies of time produces aporias, they are time’s own and real aporias. They are undecidabilities that solve problems by inventing new conceptual topologies.
