How to Read Once Again: Derrida on Husserl

Abstract

It is a truism that the agents of intellectual fashions inspire equal and opposite reactions in many of their prospective but unwilling patients. Up to the early 1990s, proponents and opponents of Derrida's deconstruction tended to make panoramic evaluations of his thought that were not based on detailed examination of individual essays, with the notable exception of John Searle's 1977 article Reiterating the Differences.1 This situation changed markedly with the arrival in 1991 of Joseph Claude Evans' booklength Strategies of Deconstruction: Derrida and the Myth of the Voice.2 Concentrating almost line by line on Speech and Phenomena,3 generally regarded as Derrida's clearest work in philosophy, and certainly his most famous, Evans argues that it constitutes a sustained misinterpretation of Husserl that ultimately shows no real interest in the latter's texts themselves. Evans is not the only critic to focus almost exclusively on Speech and Phenomena. In the same year, Kevin Mulligan published an article with the snappy title How Not to Read: Derrida on Husserl.4 Mulligan's article is of interest for several reasons. Unlike Evans, he writes from an exclusively Anglo-Austrian analytic perspective. It is clear that he is not concerned with exhibiting a charlatan inside the Continental tradition, rather with exhibiting a more obvious case of charlatanism that helps to make up that same and (on his view) sorry tradition. Thus we find him describing Derrida as philosopher, thinker, as the author of a slim in which we find 'a logic' (in the sense), and as someone whose concept of structure is inflationary in Parisian fashion.5 As this suggests, Mulligan's style is often a witty one (which is easier to carry off in ten pages rather than Evans' 200 plus). On a more serious note, he (like Evans) identifies genuine mistakes and difficulties in Derrida's reading of Husserl, the most important of which I try to outline below. He goes on to conclude that Derrida gets Husserl wrong in most important respects. His most worrying objection concerns the thesis that a subject is aware of the mental states he or she is in. According to Mulligan, this thesis applies neither to speech nor to Husserl's account of the latter. Such an objection is worrying because, if correct, it stops Derrida's essay getting off the ground. Speech and Phenomena begins with the thesis that, for Husserl, at least one form of speech inherently involves self-presence. For Mulligan, the reason why phenomenologists have rarely responded to Derrida's monograph is that they tend to confine themselves to the first of the Logical Investigations, the one that Derrida concentrates on.6 So far as I am aware, Mulligan's own piece has not had a response, in contrast to Evans.7 I hope to show that, in all but one instance, Derrida's interpretation of Husserl is far more accurate and multi-faceted than Mulligan allows. I also want to demonstrate that if we bring in the subsequent Logical Investigations and Husserl's later works, we can in fact find added textual support for Derrida's conclusions. Finally, I want to suggest that we can read Derrida again once the qualifications in his own text are taken on board. What is required is adequate contextualization, not charity. The chief objections that Mulligan raises against Speech and Phenomena run as follows: (1) Derrida's reading of Husserl seems to want to undo the distinction, not just between the imagined word and the perceived word, but between imaginative presentations and perceptual presentations in general. (2) Amongst Derrida's mistaken views is the traditional mentalist thesis that a subject is aware of the states he is in, a thesis not applicable to speech anyway. (3) Derrida makes a failed psychologistic attempt to display the role of death in our uses of signs. (4) He also claims that sign and meaning idealities command the totality of their actual and possible instantiations (including death) and so represent these, such that the resulting ideal mixed species has the magical properties of being active and efficient. …