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7 The Test of the Sign: An Investigation of Voice and Phenomenon We now enter the climax of our investigation. When one is investigating Voice and Phenomenon, it is always important to keep in mind its subtitle: “Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology.” The problem of the sign has come to replace, for Derrida, the problem of genesis. We could see this replacement approaching on the basis of our investigation of the 1962 Introduction to Husserl’s “The Origin of Geometry .” The Introduction could have been called “The Origin of Truth,” since Derrida was concerned with the dif¤culties into which Husserl was led when he described the genesis of ideal objects. The problem of genesis is that truth itself, phenomenality, requires what Derrida called there “consignation ” (LOG 86/89; cf. LOG 72/78). Truth itself cannot dispense with signs (LOG 90–91/92). Yet, it is the sign, écriture, which brings about the crisis for Husserl; and this crisis is why Husserl in The Origin of Geometry calls for an imperative of univocity. The problem, however, is that the sign is always at once equi-vocal and uni-vocal. Already therefore the problem of the sign is the problem of voice: the Introduction to Husserl’s “The Origin of Geometry” could have been called Voice and Phenomenon. A 1967 addition to “Violence and Metaphysics” tells us precisely the thesis that both the Introduction and Voice and Phenomenon share: “the phenomenon supposes originary contamination by the sign” (ED 190/129). It seems therefore that the difference between these two Husserl studies is only that, while the Introduction speci¤es this problem within Husserl’s last great work, The Crisis and the texts associated with it, in particular, The Origin of Geometry, Voice and Phenomenon speci¤es the problem of the sign within Husserl’s ¤rst great work, Logical Investigations. But we know that this speci¤cation is not what makes Voice and Phenomenon both a great and controversial work. In Voice and Phenomenon, Derrida engages in a deconstruction of Husserl’s phenomenology. As the title indicates, it concerns the very nature of phenomenology: logos (voice) and phainomenon (phenomenon). But here we must be careful: insofar as Voice and Phenomenon is a deconstruction, it works to expose the double necessity that functions at the deepest level. So, of course, Derrida claims in Voice and Phenomenon that Husserl’s phenomenology is “taken” (pris) by “the metaphysics of presence”; the ¤rst necessity is inescapable: all experience must occur within the form of the living present. Yet to say that Husserl’s phenomenology “belongs”(appartient) to the metaphysics of presence also means that Husserl’s phenomenology does not belong to the metaphysics of presence: the second necessity, the second Husserl, the “in depth” Husserl (cf. VP 114/101). The Husserl who describes the themes of nonpresence , that is, alterity and temporalization, this Husserl amounts to— here borrowing the wording from the end of “The Ends of Man”—“a discontinuous and irruptive change of terrain from Western metaphysics.”As Derrida says in “Violence and Metaphysics,” “phenomenology carries [the question of being] within itself each time that it considers the themes of temporalization, and of the relationship to the alter ego” (ED 196–97/134). Yet we also know from our investigation of “Violence and Metaphysics” that Derrida replaces the question of being with a question that is not philosophy ’s question, the question of the origin of philosophy itself. Although Levinas’s name does not appear in Voice and Phenomenon, Heidegger ’s question of being, mediated by the investigation of Levinas, becomes now “an unheard-of question.” And this question is opened, for Derrida, only through the test (l’épreuve) of the sign from within a certain inside of the metaphysics of presence. Because Voice and Phenomenon is a small book, really not much more than an extensive essay about the same length as “Violence and Metaphysics ,” it is quite easy to overlook its important claims and argumentation. Therefore, we are going to proceed by presenting in the ¤rst section the problem that Derrida confronts in Voice and Phenomenon, his general argumentation , and what he calls “the object and nerve [nerf] of the demonstration ” that he ¤nds in Husserl’s First Logical Investigation (VP 53/48). Then, in the second section,we shall examine the speci¤c arguments found in Chapters 4 and 5. Then, in a third section, we shall examine Chapters 6 and 7, which amount to the...

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