Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology

Notes

Notes The Original Motivation 1. The writing began in the summer of 1992, but research that supports this book goes back to my Imagination and Chance: The Difference between the Thought of Ricoeur and Derrida (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992). 2. I must add a “perhaps” here, since the twentieth century is hardly over and what I am saying hardly takes into account all kinds of other twentiethcentury philosophy events: psychoanalysis, critical theory, feminism, hermeneutics , and, of course, analytic philosophy. 3. I am in the process of preparing a book bearing this title, The Being of the Question: Investigations of the Great French Philosophy of the Sixties. This book will collect all the essays I have written since 1994 determining the differences between Derrida and Deleuze, Deleuze and Foucault, and Foucault and Derrida. The genuine work of philosophy to which I am referring above is to be called Memory and Life: Ideas concerning the Event of Thinking. 4. This comment too of course has to be quali¤ed. I am making it retrospectively from Derrida. Obviously, Heidegger’s being of the question enters directly, without the mediation of Merleau-Ponty, into Levinas himself, earlier in Husserl’s Theory of Intuition in 1929. Yet, because one can make Merleau-Ponty’s ambiguity concerning the experience of sense diverge into either strain of French thought, Merleau-Ponty seems to be, more than Levinas , the hinge ¤gure. As far as I know, Deleuze mentions Levinas once in all of his writings, in What Is Philosophy? See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari , Qu’est-ce la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit, 1992), p. 88n5; English translation by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell as What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 223n5. Yet Deleuze makes continuous reference to Merleau-Ponty. I also include Levinas in the “great French philosophy of the sixties,” since Totality and In¤nity appeared in 1961. 5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 74; English translation by Richard C. McCleary as Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 59, my emphasis. 6. I have ignored many of Derrida’s classical formulations of deconstruction since there have been countless commentaries written over the last twenty years concerning the “two phases of deconstruction.” 7. Zeynep Direk’s Ph.D. dissertation, “The Renovation of the Notion of Experience in Derrida’s Philosophy” (University of Memphis, 1999), was invaluable to me for determining Derrida’s sparse comments on experience in his early writings. 8. Dermot Moran in his Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2000) concludes his analysis of Derrida by saying: “ . . . it is clear that [Derrida’s ] rejection of the metaphysics of presence and of the belief in meaning as ideal unities leads him to move beyond the tradition of Husserlian phenomenology” (p. 474). Derrida departs from the tradition of phenomenology not because he rejects the belief in meaning as ideal unities but because he believes in meaning as ideal unities. For Derrida, everything depends on the Husserlian concept of the noema. 9. We ¤rst used the word “re¤nition” in “Phenomenology and Bergsonism: The Beginnings of Post-Modernism,” in Con®uences: Phenomenology and Postmodernity, Environment, Race, Gender (Pittsburgh, Duquesne University, The Simon Silverman Center, 1999), p. 63. We also think that the difference between re¤nition and recommencement may determine the difference between the Levinas-Derrida strain and the Deleuze-Foucault strain of twentieth-century Continental philosophy. 10. Moreover, Chapter 3 of The Visible and the Invisible, where Merleau-Ponty criticizes the Husserlian concept of intuition, could have helped critics understand Derrida’s interpretation of Husserl. 11. I have published reviews of the two most important studies of Derrida’s interpretation of Husserl produced in the nineties. See my review of Paola Marrati-Guénoun, La genèse et la trace. Derrida lecteur de Husserl et Heidegger (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), in Husserl Studies 16 (1999): 77–81, and my “Navigating a Passage: Deconstruction as Phenomenology,” review article of J. Claude Evans’ Strategies of Deconstruction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), in Diacritics, Fall 1993, 1–12. 1. Genesis as the Basic Problem of Phenomenology 1. Cf. Waldenfels, Phänomenologie in Frankreich (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp , 1987), 41–42. Waldenfels also mentions that Ludwig Landgrebe’s “Husserls Phänomenologie und die Motive zu ihrer Umbildung” (Rev. int. de Phil., no. 2, 277–316) played the same role as Fink’s essay. Nevertheless, Fink’s essay is mentioned almost continuously in the French interpretations of Husserl during the 1950s. Jean-François Lyotard’s 1954...