Trying On: The American Education

Is Speech and Phenomena a critique or an homage? Must these be mutually opposed?

…Husserl in any event may betray a certain uneasiness… (107)

I’m chiefly interested in how (and why–but I know right now that I can’t reach that) it is that Derrida pays attention to Husserl’s intentionality, and to the coherence of his system, in his “deconstruction” (and play with) Husserl’s texts in Speech and Phenomena. The book is both a unique critical declaration of Derrida’s style of philosophizing–indeed, it contains many of the chief moves of Of Grammatology–but is also irreducible spoken through and on the site of the specific words of Edmund Husserl.

Derrida is especially careful to note instances when Husserl seems “confused” or “frustrated” by his own metaphors for presence. Derrida sees an aporia in the whole system of transcendental phenomenology, but he doesn’t seem to be committed to knocking down Husserl or building him up–as systematizer, or as anything else. But Husserl isn’t just the scratched stratum on which Derrida makes further marks. Derrida takes seriously, and generously, the possibility of Husserl’s non-intentional utterances and his confusions–so much so that these moments of Derrida’s are difficult to process: it is almost as if we are facing a textual psychoanalysis of the writer as reader that always threatens to spill over into a psychoanalysis of the speaking subject as thinker. In short, Husserl’s confusion over metaphors is the displacement and myth of origin that Husserl cannot think through. These confusions–terrifying, because they threaten the very basis of Husserl’s projects–don’t appear until Husserl begins to make metaphor. (In fact, perhaps metaphoricity–its differing, referential structure–is the very ground of différance’s emergence?) 

Again, D. doesn’t just point out that H. contradicts himself, or that the text gets seamy. Rather, he lovingly finesses these moments in which confusion irrupts into the text. In fact, D. seems to make no order-distinction between H.’s intended utterances and these much more highly interpretive–and indeed, unusually subjective-psychoanalytic–gestures directed at H.’s presumed interstitial experience in writing his treatises. D. says, not a few times, that what he is attempting, after all, sits between a futile and misguided stab at a purely present translation of H. (which, says D., should be reserved for translations across languages, for folks who cannot speak them) and interpretation. 

However, in some cases, this “loving attention” and patience to withstand the encroachment of philosophy (and philosophical language’s) will to simplify–it just becomes a very strange and almost presumptuous setting-forth of the absent Husserl, who is not contained (at least not wholly) in the tomb of his textuality. Here, D. remarks on a “secret” move of H.’s:

…although he had not made a theme of ‘articulation’ and ‘diacritical’ work of difference in the constitution of sense and signs, he at bottom recognized its necessity (101).

What is going on here?

We will have to work hard to mark the exclusions that D.’s careful language undertakes. He is not telling us that H. failed to thematized these movements of différance. He is telling us that H. recognized these movements as necessary. But more importantly, Jacques Derrida is telling us (without really telling us anything else, only by, as it were, the naked act of his telling) that Edmund Husserl, in this particular instant, adhered to a structure of secrecy.

D. presumes that he knows what’s going on: either he has been reading the traces, or some personal communication with H. has sparked this admission, or– D. is taking a rather substantial leap of faith or walk of danger. He is speaking for Husserl. What right does one man have to tell another’s secrets? Especially when they are presumed? Especially when the supposed secret being uprooted is itself the silence of a pact of secrecy between the author and his words? 

If I follow through with it, there will, eventually, be three parts to this inquiry:

1. Thematization

2. The Author

3. Recognition

… could the (dead) author need the critic like Being needs (the watch)man?

… unheard of thoughts are required, sought for across the memory of old signs.. (102)

Hermeneutic fidelity: could we imagine such a thing? Should we?

Bad Utilitarianism: does criticism every violate the uniqueness of persons? What does it matter that we (Derrida) break(s) down the boundaries of an argument as it has been presented, the lines of a book as they have been presented. D. takes, for example, almost all of the books and written thoughts of Husserl, and plays over them, out of their différance. This différance must also be specifically, subjectively embodied: it is the différance of Husserl (not only as thinker, but as mind–man) with himself. Thus, the limits that D. points out aren’t just (t/d)ra(u)matic for the project of transcendental phenomenology–they bear down specifically on the coherence and project of a single author-subject-thinker.

Is this a tragic thing?

Is this in keeping with D.’s reduction of phenomenology to the irreducible movement of différance out from the “origins” of language? (That there is no self-present expression, no Absolute Now; and thus, no self-present, coherent, immediate consciousness–no subject). Must D. destroy the person Husserl in order to, because he, plays in the (always already) ruins of the solitary voice, of the internal monologic? 

Why do I get the strange sense that Derrida, in recycling, is stretching his limbs out through the holes in Husserl’s bodies, those are pearls that were his eyes?

(Can’t we let him die, Husserl? What does this say about D.’s politics re: what it means to enter into projects of authorship, to make oneself graphe in the public sphere? If writing is the tomb that iterates already against the possibility of my own death, in the forgetting of my death, how can we dig up death and articulate it? Does it look like zombies, or resurrection?)