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I am about to turn to section 7 of the “Introduction” to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, in which Derrida discusses writing for the first time in his published corpus, in order to answer the question that has emerged as decisive for adjudicating whether Derrida’s thought develops significantly: Is the problematic of writing in the “Introduction’s” section 7 essentially the same as that in the 1967 works? Does Derrida, by dint of having recourse to “the unthought axiomatic of Husserl’s thought” (as he puts it in “Time of a Thesis”), arrive at a truly consistent problematic of writing in the “Introduction ,” passing beyond that breakthrough in regard to writing that Husserl himself had already accomplished? As we will see, these are quite thorny issues. Some of Derrida’s best interpreters, including some leading phenomenologists, have believed the answer to be yes.1 They have interpreted the “Introduction” as presenting an account of writing the same as that of the 1967 works in all essentials , perhaps in part because they were convinced that Derrida himself had already asserted this in his remarks examined in the last chapter. In addition to this obscurity in Derrida’s comments, however, the text of section 7 itself is remarkably dense—perhaps another reason commentators have been led to precipitous conclusions. Moreover, adding to the difficulties with following Derrida’s argument in section 7 is that this section has so often been seen in isolation from the rest of the “Introduction .” The “Introduction” itself has rarely been understood in its own right—what it accomplishes grasped on its own—and section 7 has been deprived of context, doubtless thanks to these same assumptions concerning Derrida’s development that we have just brought forward.2 Derrida, however, was only a few years past thirty when the “Introduction ” went to press, and he had published nothing else prior to it at Derrida’s 1962 Interpretation of Writing and Truth: Writing in the “Introduction” to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry 53 3 the time. Even “Genesis and Structure,” which we now know is essentially an abbreviated reworking of Derrida’s 1954 Le problème, had not yet seen print (though “Genesis” had already been delivered as a conference paper in 1958—at a highly prestigious three-day gathering organized by Maurice de Gandillac, apparently one of Derrida’s early mentors, and by Jean Piaget and Lucien Goldmann). The “Introduction” was Derrida’s first publication anywhere, and it indeed stands as the introduction to Derrida’s own French translation of one of Husserl’s very last writings, Die Frage nach dem Ursprung der Geometrie als intentional-historisches Problem (a title given to this fragment by Eugen Fink). Derrida’s, in fact, remains the standard French translation of this work even today. I would like first of all, before turning to section 7, to step back and take a brief look at the “Introduction” as a whole. I wish to specify the overall philosophical position Derrida took in this work, in order to better orient our discussion of section 7. Viewing the “Introduction” as a whole will also accomplish something else: it will let another theme important for all that follows, namely history, come forward. History, and issues related to it, are a further touchstone of Derrida’s development. Two thematic threads—one related to language, the other to history—are ultimately crucial for discerning whether significant development takes place in Derrida ’s thought (and of what sort); and reviewing the work of the “Introduction ” as a whole will introduce this second theme. The main concern of Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, after all, is history, not language; and this is ultimately true of the “Introduction” as well. The Origin comes at the close of what is widely considered to be the final phase of Husserl’s thought, a phase that the Vienna and Prague lectures inaugurated , in which Husserl rather surprisingly turned to the theme of history . Apparently long allergic to historical considerations (a fact of which Derrida makes much in Le problème),3 Husserl now extends his transcendental phenomenological researches into this area: he makes history a theme of transcendental inquiry, and he attempts to incorporate some kind of historical standpoint into his own work and to propound a philosophy of history. The “Introduction,” taken as a whole, has Husserl’s late encounter with history as its topic; and in 1962 the “Introduction” represented a major intervention into this field and in phenomenological discourse generally...

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