Distorting Phenomenology

Abstract

Recently, in the correspondence which functions as the pretext for this session, Claude Evans accepts Hans-Dieter Gondek's characterization of the criticisms in Strategies of Deconstruction as hoc refutations. I also agree with this characterization, although I did not stress this in my Diacritics review of Evans's book. Given its ad hoc character, Strategies of Deconstruction contains only an aggregate of almost random arguments; it pursues merely minutiae. That Evans's correspondence with me pays attention only to my review's first and third sections-the first section concerns specific arguments on the role of language in Husserl, while the third contains arguments concerning Husserlian innertime consciousness; the second and fourth take up Derrida's more basic concerns in Speech and Phenomena and in deconstruction in general that Evans's correspondence focuses only on these specific arguments is further evidence that he still does not, or perhaps cannot or will not, recognize the most basic issue that animates Speech and Phenomena. In Strategies of Deconstruction, therefore, Evans, quite simply, fails to recognize what lies most on the surface of Speech and Phenomena. Moreover, he fails to take into account other texts, written by Derrida and other contemporaneous French philosophers, that could help one identify the issue. It is clear that, once having identified the issue, one can then attend with greater depth to the minute details. One then can one eliminate the ad hoc character of the discussion and, perhaps for the first time, genuinely engage the philosophical issues. So, what I would like to do today is first lay out the basic issue: the issue of passage or transition.' In other words, what Speech and Phenomena most basically concerns is the problem of mediation. Correlative to the basic issue, and perhaps this is all too obvious, is Derrida's attempt, like that of Deleuze for example, to reconceive the notion of difference. After explicating these two related issues-transition and difference-I would like to turn to the issue of language in Husserl, one of the issues upon which Evans so relentlessly focuses his microscopic powers. It is my contention that without understanding the issue of transition, it is impossible to understand Derrida's charge of logocentrism Husserl. Unless one has understood the basic issue that animates Derrida's reading of Husserl, it is impossible to defend philosophy from the charges Derrida levels in Speech and Phenomena; it is even impossible to do what Evans claims to be doing in Strategies of Deconstruction: defend Husserl's text against reading that distorts them (SD 179). We now have Derrida's first book on Husserl, his Memoire, his Le probleme de la genese dans la philsophie de Husserl. In the early Fifties, the time when Derrida was writing this book, the genetic issue was dominating the French appropriations of Husserl. Merleau-Ponty, Jean Hyppolite, Jean Cavailles, and Tran-Duc-Thao all turned to Husserl (among others) in order to understand genesis. Arising in this environment, Le probl*me de la genese is chronological study of the then available Husserl texts; in these texts, it examines, in particular, Husserl's descriptions of transitions or passages (cf. especially, p. 197). While Derrida's Memoire immediately provides the clue as to how to read Speech and Phenomena, it is, nevertheless, unfair to introduce it into this discussion because Evans did not have access to it when he was writing Strategies of Deconstruction. Yet, there is another text that was available to Evans that can provide just as much of clue to Derrida's project in the Sixties. This text is `Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology collected in Writing and Difference. In Genesis and Structure, Derrida briefly reproduces his analyses from Le probleme de la genese, going from Husserl's earliest writings to his latest. Here, for Derrida, the issue is one of a wild genesis (une genese sauvage) which became more and more pervasive and seemed to accommodate itself less and less to phenomenological apriorism and to transcendental idealism (ED 232/157). …