Whenever we speak of something ‘pure’ or ‘absolute’ or
‘infinite’, as Derrida often does, we are in the realm of
transcendence, since we never encounter the pure or
absolute in our experience, it is never something that can
be present to experience. The Idea of a pure mother, for
instance, would be the idea of a mother who would not be
something other than a mother--not a daughter, not a lover,
not a wife. We can think this idea, but we don’t encounter
The experience of moral responsibility, for Derrida,
conforms to such an aporetic structure. You find yourself
participating in a rather closed practice of responsibility, and
through deconstruction you become more open to a higher call
that cannot be articulated closely but does make a difference to
your future possibilities of action toward others whose mode of
being and faith has confused or offended you in some way.
Deleuze is also impressed by several of his own
predecessors who project the immanence of being. But,
paralleling Derrida’s movement with respect to transcendence, he
does not think that they have come to terms sufficiently with
the complexity and evanescence of immanence. In a way that
recalls Kant while reversing him, a philosopher of radical
immanence can think the swarm of differences that subsist below
actuality, but cannot know or represent difference in itself.
Convention