Absolute Gegenstoß

“It must be said that the first is not the first if there is not a second to follow it. Consequently, the second is not that which merely arrives, like a latecomer, after the first, but that which permits the first to be the first. The first cannot be the first unaided, by its own properties alone: the second, with all the force of its delay, must come to the assistance of the first. It is through the second that the first is the first. The ‘second time’ thus has priority of a kind over the ‘first time’: it is present from the first time onwards as the prerequisite of the first’s priority without itself being a more primitive ‘first time’, of course; it follows that the ‘first time’ is in reality the ‘third time’.” (Descombes on Derrida, Modern French Philosophy, 1980)

§ 842

“It is only when essence has sublated its equality-with-self that it is equality-with-self. It presupposes itself and the sublating of this presupposition is essence itself; conversely, this sublating of its presupposition is the presupposition itself. Reflection therefore finds before it an immediate which it transcends and from which it is the return. But this return is only the presupposing of what reflection finds before it. What is thus found only comes to be through being left behind; its immediacy is sublated immediacy. Conversely, the sublated immediacy is the return-into-self, the coming-to-itself of essence, simple, self-equal being. Hence this coming-to-itself is the sublating of itself and is the self-repelling, presupposing reflection, and its self-repelling is the coming-to-itself of reflection.” (Hegel, Science of Logic)

“If something like a fall has always already taken place, has taken place essentially or necessarily, then every experience contains an aspect of lateness. It seems as though I am always late for the origin since it seems to have always already disappeared. Every experience then is always not quite on time or, as Derrida quotes Hamlet, time is “out of joint.” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/derrida/)