In veiled polemic against Lacan on the one hand and Deleuze on the other, Derrida declares that the metaphysical notions of truth-presence function as fetishes aiming to supplement and hide the lack of phallus of truth as woman; but that if one rebels against truth, seen as castrating, one falls into the phallocentrism which inspires this denial. Reduced to a fiction truth is still something under our control. But ‘castration does not take place’; the ‘il faut’ of truth, as the ‘law’ of judgement’ cannot be fixed in a stable, fetishised way. We are caught in its play without being able to master it, either by raising it to dogmatic certitude or unmasking it as illusion.
This Nietzschean vertigo replaces the Heideggerian vision of the essence of truth, the Ereignis, event of being. Derrida opens the Ereignis onto the enigmas of truth as woman, not to dissolve the truths of science, ethics, psychoanalysis or ontology, but to show the abyssal ground in which they are rooted and which they can never recuperate or reduce. The Ereignis, interpreted in this way, subordinates presence to a play of the simulacrum and of seduction, for the Ereignis reveals itself to be ‘origin-heterogeneous’; instead of recollecting in itself the essence of being, it dissolves every notion of proper origin or foundation.
