The origin of the problem dealt within this work goes back to a dialogue on the idea of gift and problem of horizon in phenomenology between Jean-Luc Marion and Jacques Derrida, in a roundtable conversation moderated by Richard Kearney. In the specific section of that dialogue, they express their opinions about the possibility of “phenomenology without horizon”, “phenomenology without as such” and “suspension of horizon” and likely implications of these, if they are achieved. During the dialogue, in that section, it seems that Derrida and Marion arrive at an impasse (not like an aporia where they paralyze and cancel each other out, but more like they both reach to the same point where it is phenomenologically inadvisable to try to cross over, though surely thinkable in a sense). For them, testing the limits of that point is equal to testing the limits of phenomenology. The research before you tries to tackle and ponder this problem of horizon and limit, by borrowing it from that impasse. While this endeavour, from the get-go, necessitates a phenomenological sensitivity which posits a difference between (1) suspension of horizon, (2) annihilation of horizon, and (3) “the lack (absence or non-presence) of horizon from the very beginning”, moreover, it also requires the examination of (4) the non-being (not-being) of horizon, if “the phenomenology without horizon” or “a horizon-free phenomenology” is to be sought after. While the first three can be managed from within a post-structural phenomenology already available, because of the fourth, this seeking after becomes operable only through the idea of non-event and a phenomenology of impasse. Here rises the rather unconstructed conditions and insight which would help to surpass an impasse without really surpassing it (since an impasse is what it is only because it is impossible for it to be surpassed), and still “be true to phenomenology”, so to speak; through not overtaking that impasse, but rather taking it over by undertaking it. Though it might lead to more problems than it solves away, this research (which gathers four contextually different but related texts together) explores the phenomenality of impasse as the liminality of horizon, and the non-event (between being and non-being, as happening through not happening) which is both momentary and instantaneous within a self-negating process of any phenomenality. In this sense, an impasse is not something to be surpassed and transcended, but rather it turns into an event which must befall by being let play itself, not out, but through and through, endlessly, with the happening of it being carried alongside the rest of the way, as it presences the very rest of the way. Would this mean that the phenomenology of impasse (meaning, the gateway to any phenomenology without horizon or as such) is possible only through the non-event?
