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It is significant that although Gasché goes to great pains to articulate the heterogeneity of the matrix différance (as a non-unitary archi-synthesis of radically heterogeneous infra- structures), his structural-linguistic-graphic analysis of this horizon also tends to conceal, at another level, differences between different kinds of differences or differential marks. The meta-general level to which the question of representation is raised as an integral moment of the critique of the 'language of presence' can obscure vital and related differences. This is also true, in many instances, for Derrida. There are times when discourse on the questions of repetition, reflexivity and representation must ultimately suffer through such obscuration (this is certainly the case with the crucial distinction between apodictic evidence and that which is classed as adequate). Most significantly, we find a fundamental difficulty in disentangling the important differences between retention and secondary remembrance that are disclosed in

Husserl's research on time consciousness. Both forms of remembrance are modes of re- presentation, but the former is also to be understood as presentation, since it is an originary giving of the past. However, the latter is a form of presentification (or secondary presentation / reproduction) permitted by retention, which is able to work upon that which is more originally given up to it.19 The openness of retention and protention is to be contrasted with the object- related (finite) character of recollection and expectation. The reflexivity of which the first speaks has a pre-objective dimension, whereas the second is a reflexive movement of objectivation.20 The first movement is the passivity that operates at the heart of the activity of the second. Husserl gives us a subtle, but powerful distinction between the reflexive intentionalities of temporalizing consciousness as the a priori condition of any possible experience and the objectivating acts of reflection through which consciousness can, secondarily, objectify itself. According to his phenomenological studies on time consciousness, "It is thanks to retention...that consciousness can be made an Object" (PITC, Appendix IX, p.161). It is vital to be clear at this point that retention is not a form of intentionality that can be reduced to the level of an 'act.' According to Husserl,

Retention itself is not an 'act' (i.e., an immanent unity of duration constituted in a series of retentional phases) but a momentary consciousness of the phase which has expired and, at the same time, a foundation for the retentional consciousness of the next phase (Ibid).

Furthermore, the retentional running-off of consciousness is not to be confused with acts that pass-off into a flow of image-objects or doubles, which are representations of representations of representations, etc. – a movement that would produce a kind of infinite regress. Retentions are not discrete / distinct objects or points that are adjacent to one another

along such a continuum. They embody the continuum of retentional modifications within themselves. This is to be understood in relation to what Husserl refers to as a movement of sinking-down (Herabsinken – which is represented as a diagonal line moving downwards from the present to the past). Thus, we have the tracing out of the vertical of experience.

Retentions embody depth in that they bear former retentions within themselves. Retention is indeed retention of retention and so on, but the structurality of this flux is not ultimately reducible to an 'objective' order of successions. This retentional repetition (in its intertwining with protention) is that which originarily constitutes the 'space' of succession – it gives 'duration' through a holding-back (here, the it gives expresses a similar sense to Heidegger's use of the term es gibt in the essay "Time and Being"). Such an extending (stretching and postponing) movement of return does not actually negate the possibility of the presence of evidence, certainty, continuity (the experience of the marriage of sameness and difference: change), meaning-fulfilment, etc., as if it perpetually deferred every kind of intentional fulfilment – as would be the case with a linear continuum of purely 'objective' repetitions that remained separated (external) to one another. The form of the directedness of the interwoven patterns of intentional relations – the outside-itself structure of all intentionalities – produces the 'field' in which fulfilment of any kind can originally take place. At the heart of this transitivity, we find certain forces of deferral, which actually constitute the self-fulfilling function of intentional directedness. Here, the terms intentionality and directedness are interchangeable. If different moments are to register as different times in relation-to-one- another, then a certain structure of delay must be at work in-the-relation without annihilating the relation itself. Obviously, delay also functions as relation. The holding-back constitutes the opening through which the consciousness of succession is possible.

The sense of Husserl's concept of primal apprehension is to be found within this deep transcendental context (which is tied so intimately to the issue of temporalization). It is certainly not to be confused with a higher-order psychological impression of an imagistic character that would require a further act of apprehension of the act itself in order for perception to occur. This would give rise to the necessity of a yet another act, which would need to apprehend the second, and so on, indefinitely.21 Certainly, in order that we can speak of consciousness as consciousness of something in the first place, there must be some kind of articulation of the differences between the 'intending' and the 'intended' – otherwise, how could we speak of the preposition of? Each act carries this difference within itself, not as a mirroring or doubling of itself and its content, but as a sense-directed (transitive) relation that is immanent-in-relation to itself as a transcending movement toward something Other. This immanence of consciousness to itself, through the detour of alterity, is the effect of the reflexive unity of duration of the intending itself – which is pre-objective. The difference is announced in primal apprehension through the articulated play / play of articulation between modalities of appearing and that which appears.

Each consciousness, then, does not rely on a further objectivating act in order to function. Intentional consciousness, as a 'flow of becoming,' carries this reflexivity within itself, in principle, by virtue of the flux of primordial temporalization that constitutes each act as a 'unity of duration' – an immanently-transcending bending-back-of-a-return. The diagram below is probably the most famous illustration of this transcending and / is recuperative structural-movement of the intentionality of consciousness.22

Fig. 1

At the level at which Derrida and Gasché discuss reflexivity, repetition, and representation it often becomes difficult to account for different modes of the inter-relationship between immanence and transcendence. As already indicated, Derrida's orientation in Speech and Phenomena does not adequately distinguish between different senses of presence (appearing / appearance) and the present (in temporal terms) and thus cannot account for how absence can still, in a certain sense, be immanent. Once again, this is a symptom of his application of Heidegger's thesis that Being as presence (ousia and parousia) has always been thought in relation to the temporal sense of the present as now (although Heidegger does not restrict the form of the now to a point). In Derrida’s account, Anwesenheit and Gegenwart become almost indistinguishable semantically.

There are also other significational differences of a subtle kind that are even more elusive and yet which are fundamental to any discussion on the functioning of signs. This brings us to the theme of the double intentionality of retention, as adumbrated by Husserl in the lectures on time – a discourse that has clearly (and profoundly) influenced Derrida's thematization of the crucial sense of différance as deferral.

The retentional shading-off, through which lived-experience is stretched out, comprises both the language of appearances and the language of appearing in the unfolding of experience through the extending / spacing of primordial temporalization. This involves a

transformational movement of return that originarily gives duration. It is their originary intertwining (as opposed to disjunction) that gives the most fundamental differences. The theme of the double-intentionality of retention responds to some extremely compelling questions concerning the conditions of the possibility of lived time consciousness. It may be understood in the following terms:

1. Inscription, carving, marking, writing, tracing = the retention of that which is no-longer –> a retaining that is the condition of the possibility of an appearance as a unity of duration. We might, but only very loosely, speak of this aspect of retention as a kind of doubling. However, this movement of inscription is actually auxiliary to that second aspect of retention which originarily constitutes positional differentiation of a temporal order. An inscribed moment must be capable of being delivered up in relation to other temporal positions – and this means that the relations of difference must somehow be able to give themselves within a single grasp. There is a differential 'style' that has to be taken into account that permits the simultaneous interpenetration and standing-out of different moments without removing their temporal differences.

2. The being-inscribed of the inscription –> the spacing-out of the mark as re- marking in a specific modal form of appearing –> the 'manner' or 'style' in which the mark (retention) articulates itself = the retention of that which is no- longer precisely as that which is no longer. This is the mode of appearing of that which is given in relation to other moments of the past (including the ever fresh now). The retained mark must have the 'character' of a retained mark (and it must also distinguish itself from other retained marks). It is a deferred

presentation – a presence that is Other to the present; a presence in the present that is not of the present, in the sense in which it falls short of the present – otherwise it could do no more than appear 'as-now,' in which case there would not be 'temporal duration / succession,' but only an eternal present in which all was given, as Husserl says, 'Zügleich' (all-at-once). Although, it must be said that there is also another kind of all-at-once that is not equal to the lack of the appearing of succession. The very meaning of temporal horizon involves a kind of vertical and horizontal opening through which different temporal positions can be given simultaneously without eradicating their temporal signatures relative to one another. Any event that gives itself must be more than the sum of a singular temporal modality. The event as-it-gives-itself in the Living Present is always made up of fringes of the before and after. The second intentionality, of which we speak, holds together different moments together within a single grasp (a longitudinal orientation), without nullifying their differences since the other face of this giving is a certain 'holding-back.' What is crucial here is that just like the visual horizon of things stretching into the distance, the temporal continua are framed as a uniform sinking-back of moments into the past without shuffling the order of their consecutivity from the perspective of the ever-fresh Living Present.

In combination, this is precisely the twofold relation necessary for the constitution of any horizon and the process of sedimentation. It is an intertwining of proximity and distance, a fold that is an unfolding of depth. In a way, one could say that a horizon is everywhere (given in a single grasp) and yet it recedes. Like a gestalt, this temporal horizon is the contextualizing structure (or connective tissue) that binds different moments together, while simultaneously

holding them apart. So here we find that the all-at-once does not necessarily mean non-time, but a manner in which time, in its unfolding, folds in on itself (like the instantaneity of all spatial points in a hologram). The second (longitudinal) intentionality of retention is constitutive of the 'unity' of the appearing of that which appears in the flux (an unfolding of changing temporal modalities of the same) in that it gives a certain temporal difference through the giving of the flow itself. It is a stretching-out of duration itself (without restricting the actual appearing to a purely discrete appearance that is given in a sequence of successions). There is a kind of presentative scan (not re-presentation) of that which is no longer present, where the latter can be anything from a particular moment to a sedimented multiplicity.23

Taken together, these forms of intentionality (along with protention as negotiated through primal impression) constitute the consciousness of the 'passing-over' of that which was now into that which is not-now. Retention does not merely present a temporal object as 'give' a certain interval – the spacing, through which it is stretched out. In section 39 of The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness (The Double Intentionality of Retention and the Constitution of the Flux of Consciousness), Husserl shows how the ‘duration’ of a sound is articulated as such, when he writes,

Every shading off of consciousness which is of the 'retentional' kind has a double intentionality: one is auxiliary to the constitution of the immanent Object, of the sound. This is what we term 'primary remembrance' of the sound just sensed, or more plainly just retention of the sound. The other is that which is constitutive of the unity of this primary remembrance in the flux. That is, retention is at one with this, that it is further- consciousness [Foch-Bewusstsein]; it is that which holds back, in short, it is precisely retention, retention of the tonal retention which has passed. In its continuous shading-

off in the flux, it is continuous retention of the continuously preceding phases (§39, p.106-7)

In sum, the twofold intentionality of retention gives us a certain movement of reciprocal implication: retention of that which is no longer present. This refers us to the logic of appearance – and is auxiliary to the deferring / holding-back which constitutes it as one moment of a 'unity of duration.' With this, we also have the retention of the retentional 'orientation' through which that which is no longer present is ‘given’ precisely as that which is no longer present. This speaks of the logic of appearing: the structurality and modality of the given in its givenness, that aspect of presencing that gives duration through a certain kind of deferral of presence, or more precisely, the deferral of a certain 'mode' of presence, e.g., that of nowness. And, in addition to the givenness of not-nowness we find that the relative before and after of the relations between past moments up to the present is preserved.

These forms of intentionality express an essential intertwining of absence and presence. Within this movement of delayed return, we already find a reference to protention as it fulfils itself in an ever fresh now, and where the articulation of 'pastness' implies a certain evidence of surpassing – a "further-consciousness...which holds back."24 The relation between these two forms of intentionality is that which can be said to obtain between a profile and the constitutive profiling of the profile, the maintained and the maintaining of the maintained, or the imprint and (to borrow from Derrida once again) the ‘being-imprinted of the imprint.’ The unfolding of their relation speaks of the complicity of time and alterity – or more specifically, continuity: as the complicity of alterity and sameness in time. Continuity speaks of a certain difference in similarity, the same as Other, where the same does not equal the identical in terms of the 'modality' of its givenness. Thus, we find the maintenance of the intentional object, content – which is inscribed as Other / not-now and the primary constitutive unfolding of the modalities

of its maintenance, context-ualization: 'depth.' This temporalizing / temporizing (deferring) is that which produces the duration / space in which the first can announce itself as Other. The flux is not reducible to a continuum of objective moments that are retained, for it is primarily a retaining of the retaining – continua of continua. The movement of deferral that is in play here gives us a kind of spacing in that it is a retentional dynamic that permits various forms of stretching-out and sinking-down. Retention is the intertwining of the horizontal and the vertical / the transversal and the longitudinal. Retentions retain retentions in a manner that spaces them out – gives depth.

This distanciating interplay gives duration through a movement of sedimentation (a reserve / reserving, which pre-serves; a reservation; a reservoir), which is precisely the opening up of temporality and spatiality: temporal-spacing as deferring return – a deferring that gives difference by spacing-it-out. According to this orientation, spacing and temporalizing are intertwined in an originary way. They intrinsically implicate repetition as the expression of both the possibility of the announcement of difference, its nullification, and the bringing-together of differences as differences within a horizon of belonging. They do this because they speak, principally, of the more primordial possibility of return as the pivot of the originary opening-up of an interplay between changing temporal modes of orientation and that which is given through the flux of Ablaufsphänomene. This intertwined parallelism produces the space that is constitutive of the articulated tension between difference and sameness, absence and presence, transcendence and immanence, transgression and recuperation, etc. Such an opening is also a kind of closure. It is the originary opening and closing of difference precisely, because it is the hinge (folding-joint) that permits differences to mark themselves out through their return upon themselves as differences.

Retention is a 'pivotal' signification for Derrida in that it speaks of the functioning – spacing – of difference in temporizing terms: as altering delay and repetition. The movement

of retention is the manner in which time spaces itself – that is, retention is a returning, which gives temporal stretch and depth. It unfolds duration through the continuous retention of the retentional orientation of that which is retained. This effectively produces a deferring of the retained in relation to itself (thus sinking further down) as it extends, by means of protention, into the future. It is a retaining of that which gives a certain difference to the character of that which is retained. Such a difference is constituted through some form of 'delay.'

The essence of retention then (in its intertwining with protention), lies in its production of a manifold of different modalities of presencing through a movement of altering return – a