The commenter does not disagree with me, or at least I don't disagree with him. When I talked about the moment as being internally divided, referring to both a past and a future moment -- that just is the trace structure. I was summarizing, and the commenter is using the technical Derridean term.
I think that's great for Kotsko's reading, which I prefer. Yes, I think the "trace structure" is just as he says, simply Derridean for “impermanence,” and not some strange abolition of time.
So what we have in Hägglund is time as succession, which implies a "present" of some kind, and instants of some kind: maybe strange ones (uncanny, nonidentical) but recognizable enough. There are still moments. There is a trace structure, and this just means that moments keep dissolving into the next one. This is better for the atheist argument, though it suffers from the limit of not incorporating temporality fully into ontology. Time is a one way tube through which things travel.
So my sense that these strange moments can be further subdivided into further uncanny moments, in a potentially infinite regress, still stands. So what we have here is a plenitude, not a vacuum, of instants. Sure, empty deconstructed ones—but there they are, they have a name, the trace structure.
And we're back to my series of observations. I guess one of my favorites is, “So what if God is impermanent? Wouldn't that make it more urgent to have a relationship with her (or whomever)?” And the notion that perhaps Hägglund is closer to an atheistic Christianity or apophatic OOO in which there is no “top object” or master signifier (that kind of God), but a contingent withdrawnness, in everything.
I still think Hägglund is not too bad for theists, then.
The thing is, the commenter is saying that our assessment of the trace structure is incorrect:
I don't agree with your reading. The point isn't that time is broken into little bits; it's that no instant is ever really present. All presence is an effect of a trace structure (or, "spacing," which I believe is the term of Derrida's that Hagglund uses).
To say that this means a succession of hollowed out events (that refer to past and future) is not just summarizing (see his comment on that post, below): it's quite different. The commenter wants to distinguish quite rigorously here. So yeah, I think if Kotsko's position is true, and I think it is, it deals quite a blow to the idea of a purely contingent whateverbeing that has no space for God. Things are simply impermanent, which we know without having to read Derrida. And without having to enforce an atheist belief system via Derrida.
(This is an extra quibble at this point, but in the last quotation by the commenter, exactly what does the “effecting” of presence? If it's all empty and nonidentical, how does it attain anything like an identity, any kind of “effect” of one, at all? Doesn't this imply correlationism, really? In other words, in Hägglund's system if the commenter is correct, isn't there some kind of observer or measurer that isn't affected by the trace structure to observe an “effect” of it? This is quite similar to some idealist interpretations of quantum theory, for instance Neumann's. Nothing really happens but there is an “effect” of it happening for some external measuring thing like a subject.)
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