Transcendental Ontologism and Derrida's Reading of Husserl

Abstract

THE PROSPECT OF DIALOGICAL MEDIATION IN THE DISPUTE BETWEEN HUSSERLIANS AND DERRIDEANS It is perhaps no accident that at precise juncture of Speech and Phenomena where Derrida characterizes that is to be problematized in his reading of Husserl, a move with the starting point to be found in precomprehension of sense of a word, privilege of question, `what is . '?, Heidegger is mentioned.1 Specifically, Heidegger's meditation on historical configuration of reversals of naive ontology by classical metaphysics and ontology is mentioned, and mentioned in terms of one of its most enduring themes (SP, p. 26), which, for Derrida, is continuance of metaphysics through (and perhaps in spite of) these reversals. Despite Derrida's apparent approbation of Heideggerian meditation, Heidegger's evocation at critical juncture in Derrida's reading of Husserl is accompanied by following somewhat cryptic remark: only by a superficial reading of Heidegger's texts that one could conclude that these texts themselves fall under these, Heidegger's, own objections (ibid.). Indeed, while Derrida thinks, without being able to go into it . . . that no one before has better escaped them, he nevertheless cautions that this does not mean, of course, that one often escapes them afterwards (ibid.). One cannot help wondering with respect to meaning of cryptic text of Derrida's whether Heidegger's complicated and seemingly ambivalent relationship to Husserl's phenomenology, to phenomenology's breakthrough discovery, looms on horizon, not so much as context but as pretext, for Derrida's own complicated and seemingly ambivalent relationship to Husserl's phenomenology. Indeed, to extent that it could be maintained that Heidegger's question asks not simply about Being of entities (beings), but about meaning of Being of entities, about possibility of encountering both entities and their Being in mode of phenomena, it would appear that, however critical stance of his thinking may appear with respect to actuality of phenomenology as a movement, specter of phenomenology's possibility, of its Husserlian possibility, must remain as pretext for Heidegger's question. Likewise, then, for Derrida, to extent that his reading of Husserl, of tradition, addresses issue of meaning of a sign in general, issue of significative showing as such, it would appear that, again, however critical his reading of Husserl on signs and showing, of Husserl's signs and showing, specter of phenomenology, in guise not only of its Husserlian possibility but of its putative encounter by Heidegger as an actuality in need of renewed possibilizing, must remain as pretext for Derrida's reading. Be as it may, my concern in what follows will not be to pursue pretext or pretexts for Derrida's reading of Husserl; nor, for that matter, to pursue pretext(s) for a Husserlian response to Derrida's reading of Husserl. I am interested in something that is, perhaps, rather different. To wit, my concern is something like this: why do able readers of same texts and insightful thinkers of same issues or matters themselves seem to come to such very different conclusions regarding both what these texts say and how these matters appear? More specifically, why do Husserl's texts appear for some readers to be spellbound by equation of Being with presence, of signification with non-indicative simple meaning, with result that these texts appear hell-bent on explaining constitution of terms of these equations by always framing them within finite subjective genesis of an ideality that is yielded by iterative/repetitive passage to a limit? And why for others does such a reading itself appear spellbound by an ontologization of a nuance, a nuance whose essence legislates against very terms of these equations as well as against their putative constitutive genesis? …