Abstract
This chapter exclusively focuses on the ways in which Derrida conceives of the insufficiencies of Husserlian phenomenology, especially “intentionality” as it might relate with desire. Since Derrida calls for an “impossible” relation with the future “to-come” that is out of the reach of “my will or desire,” Husserlian “directedness” must be replaced with différance, the differing and deferring of which are experienced intuitively through an openness and “indifference.” Différance disrupts phenomenological presence by “procuring it” for “its openness” to something otherwise, and this chapter will pose that Derrida’s rejection of the possibility of “desire” in the intentional structure of Husserlian phenomenology is a central and formative development in the early stages of deconstruction. The rejections of intentional consciousness, which for Derrida amount to a rejection of desire, are sutured to his other concerns for phenomenology, such as its conceptions of the transcendental, temporality, “the sign,” history, and teleology. In the end, the will (and with it, desire) must be defeated, for it is an “adversed mobility” of going out of “oneself and returning into oneself.”
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Notes
- 1.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe on Science: An Anthology of Goethe’s Scientific Writings, ed. Jeremy Naydler (Edinburgh, Scotland: Floris books, 1996), p. 91.
- 2.
“This indifference to content here is not an indifference, it is not an attitude of indifference, on the contrary. Marking any opening to the event and to the future as such, it therefore conditions the interest in and not the indifference to anything whatsoever, to all content in general. Without it [marking the opening to the future], there would be neither intention, nor need, nor desire, and so on.” Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 73.
- 3.
Though a Kantian understanding of desire is not detectable in his epistemology, one can get a sense of how he understands it in his Aesthetics, specifically as it comes in relation to pleasure, delight and, paradoxically, “disinterestedness.” One experiences delight through beauty, but in order to do so, one must have some degree of disinterestedness in being satisfied through beauty’s representation. But still this disinterested satisfaction “always has a reference to the faculty of desire.” This desire is distinct from “interest” or purposiveness, and comes through an individual’s aesthetic tastes. Kant suggests that “The satisfaction which we combine with the representation of the existence of an object is called interest. Such satisfaction always has reference to the faculty of desire, either as its determining ground or as necessarily connected with its determining ground.” Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment. Trans by James Creed Meredith. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2007) Part 1, section 2, 205A, p. 37.
- 4.
The messianic calls one to reject oneself: “…the messianic sentence carries within it an irresistible disavowal.” This messiah calls me to leave the other to come… free in his movement, out of reach of my will or desire, beyond my very intention. An intention to renounce intention, a desire to renounce desire, etc. ‘I renounce you, I have decided to’: the most beautiful and the most inevitable in the most impossible declaration of love.” For Derrida the Messiah is “beyond” one’s intention and this is, in fact, the very nature of messianism. Thus, the only kind of “access” point to the messianic, if there be one, is through an intentional act of the renunciation of intention itself. Here, “intention” is used synonymously with “desire,” and a kind of decisionism. But this decisionism is an abolishment of the will, not way to find its fulfillment. This is indeed a messianism without religion; one without a connection to a religious tradition. See Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship (New York: Verso, 1997), p. 174:
- 5.
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1973), p. 101.
- 6.
Concerning these limits, Marrati puts it nicely: “with the limits of phenomenology one touches, according to Derrida, on the limits of the philosophical project itself.” Paola Marrati, Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 2.
- 7.
Or as Marrati phases it, phenomenology wishes to found “itself upon itself.” Ibid., p 2.
- 8.
Given my argument that Derrida forcefully rejects intentionality in favor of a intuition and the différance that occurs in it, Lawlor’s thesis appears to suppose the opposite: “Derrida’s concept of différance derives from the Husserlian concept of intentionality; like intentionality, différance consists in an intending to; it is defined by the dative relation.” Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University press, 2002), p. 230.
- 9.
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1973), p. 68.
- 10.
Though Derrida speaks of an “inside” and “outside” here, we can’t take this to mean that he seriously employs these terms for any serious philosophical reflection, as it will later be shown how Derrida deconstructs the distinction between “inside” or “outside.” Jacques Derrida, “A Conversation with Jacques Derrida” in Deconstruction in a Nutshell, ed. John D. Caputo (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), p. 9. As Wesphal puts it – though at the risk of allowing the reader to become a “passive” recipient of its work – deconstruction is “not so much something we do as observe.” Merold Wesphal, “Continental Philosophy of Religion,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion, ed. William J. Wainwright (New York: Oxford Publishing, 2005), pp. 472–93.
- 11.
Similarly, in her recent work Genesis and Trace, Marrati outlines the most crucial ways in which Derrida differs from Husserl, suggesting that “it is around the theme of genesis that some of Derrida’s most insistent preoccupations will come to be gathered: the question of the contamination of the empirical and the transcendental, the question of the temporality of sense, the question of origin and history.” Paola Marrati, Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p 2.
- 12.
Lawlor asserts that Derrida’s reading of Husserl was highly influenced by Eugen Fink’s Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl in the Contemporary Critique (a work that is known to have influenced a number of first and second generation Heidegger scholars in France as well), Jean Cavaillés’ On Logic and the Theory of Science, Jean Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence, and then Tran-Duc Thao’s Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism. See also Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University press, 2002).
- 13.
“Intentionality” was Husserl’s proposed solution to the problem of how the subject and the phenomenon relate. Husserl dedicated his 1884 Philosophy of Arithmetic to his professor and mentor, Brentano, the one who inspired Husserl to see the importance of “intentionality.” Intentionality is one of the most consistent concepts in his vast corpus of writings. As Marrati recommends, his initial interest in turning to the concept of intentionality was in order to “reconcile the act of the constituting subject and the objectivity of the intended signification.” Paola Marrati, Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 6.
- 14.
Indeed, Husserl’s meditations on intentionality or “directedness” are derived directly from his teacher, Brentano, who claimed that “every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not do so in the same way. In presentation, something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. This intentional inexistence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We can, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves.” Franz Brentano quoted in Dagfinn Follesdal, “Husserl’s Reductions and the Role They Play in His Phenomenology,” in A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus, Mark A. Wrathall (Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), p. 107. See Franz Brentano, Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1924).
- 15.
On more Phenomenological grounds, Ricoeur notes that “to say that I desire is to say that the object attracts me.” Husserl had a certain distaste for classical psychology, which “constructed man like a house: below were the elementary functions; above was an extra level, the will. Need, desire, and habit were transposed from animal psychology as required.” Paul Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 53 and p. 217 respectively.
- 16.
Desire has certain “aims” for Husserl. For Smith, Husserl’s “intentionality covers not only the way an intention or volition is aimed at doing something, but also the way a perception or thought or desire is aimed at some object, the object of perception, thought, or desire.” David Woodruff Smith. Husserl. (Taylor & Francis, 2007), p. 192.
- 17.
Though Husserl has a heavy-handed critique of the psychological approaches of his times, his phenomenology begins with a classification of those different types of “acts” of conscious experiences, which Brentano developed; for example, those of desire, imagination, and perception which are a part of Brentano’s “descriptive psychology.” However, Husserl promotes these types as having more influential roles in his philosophy. Brentano made a sharp distinction between what he called “descriptive psychology,” which simply “describes” the experiences of consciousness, and “genetic psychology,” which looks for the “genesis” or beginning of how that mental state came into being. As Smith demonstrates, in phenomenology they are “now, a vital part of the essence of an act of a certain type…the intentionality of the act,” which is “a complex relation among subject, act, content and object: ego – act – content -> object.” David Woodruff Smith, Husserl (Taylor & Francis, 2007), p. 54 & p. 233.
- 18.
See here Hannah Arendt, “Willing,” in The Life of the Mind (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1978).
Nietzsche initiates his own reflection on the will as freedom, whereby one has the “will” to shape power (creatively). This will is not an Apollonian sort of “control,” but an active creation. Philosophy should be about the triumph of “Wille” (our intentional, self-disciplined will) over Willkur (arbitrary desire). This, for Philosophy, is a much-needed distinction between “instinctual drives” and “intentional desire.” Through this intentional desire, one is opened up to the world through saying “yes!” to the Dionysian “excess”, which leads to truth. Thus, the Wille zur Macht is not control, but a particular sort of self-mastery that infinitely multiplies into the possibilities of truth, insofar as it is performed.
- 19.
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1973), p. 34.
- 20.
Derrida’s critical interpretation of Husserl’s intentionality has not gone without critique, however. The question becomes to what extent Husserl’s intentionality presupposes a certain transcendental horizon of “touching.” Willard, for example, argues that Husserl’s phenomenology does not fall to the critiques that Derrida levels against it. Instead, Willard insists that “there is a long-standing tradition in Western thought according to which whatever objects present themselves to consciousness are the products of some more fundamental type of “touching” between the mind and something else” and Willard’s “first thesis here is that Derrida falls squarely within this “Midas” tradition in the interpretation of intentionality: a tradition which very few philosophers in the modern period – possibly only Husserl, though the most common reading does not even exempt him – have managed to escape. It seems clear that intentionality for Derrida really is a kind of making: a making that is always a re-making, thus moving all ‘objects’ – the individual as well as the universal – into the realm of the ideal as he understands it, and simultaneously doing ‘violence’ to that from which this ‘ideal’ object of consciousness is produced, as well as to the produced object itself.” Dallas Willard, “Predication as Originary Violence: A Phenomenological Critique of Derrida’s View of Intentionality,” in Working Through Derrida, ed. G. B. Madison (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), p. 120.
- 21.
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1973), p. 73–74. And as Derrida later continues, this distinction “determines an epoch characterized by the philosophical idea of truth and the opposition between truth and appearance…” Ibid., p. 77.
- 22.
Ibid., p. 33. For Derrida, Husserl’s expression means “the going-forth-beyond-itself of an act, then of a sense, which can remain in itself, however, only in speech, in the ‘phenomenological’ voice.”
- 23.
In a way not entirely distinct from Lacan, Derrida ultimately wanted to see speaking and discourse “unleash” or free expression in very practical, even political ways. If expression is “unleashed” then there is an effect: one can bring down oppressive ideologies, regimented systems of morality, political repression and so forth. The point of transition from an “early” to a “late” Derrida (if it is possible to speak of Derrida in these terms) can be seen in his movement from describing deconstruction and “discourse” to prescribing it in its socio-cultural dimensions.
- 24.
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1973), p. 33–34.
- 25.
Ibid., p. 34.
- 26.
Ibid., p. 34.
- 27.
Or as Caputo puts it, Derrida’s “dissemination ‘moves beyond’” the eidetic reduction in particular “which is a reduction to meaning, toward a more radical reduction of meaning [itself], a grammatological liberation of the signifier, releasing it into its free play.” John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University press, 1987), p. 148.
- 28.
One recognizes signs prior to the audible experiences of language, and since signs are simply regulative (i.e., they play by the rules of the game), there is something at-work beneath their surface; some unintelligible, yet dynamic force. This is the seed that Derrida appears to find most intriguing in Semiotics.
- 29.
Derrida interprets Husserl to provide no distinction “between Sinn and Bedeutung,” however, “logical meaning is an expression.” This is where Derrida sides more with Semiotics, for it is about making sense and becoming rational (though never in actuality), intelligible, or significant. Intelligibility is not the same as rationality, though, as it can be nonsense (See also Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense). “Sense” is made through a differential in language. Language itself, is a way of differentiating between the thing that is, and our claim about what we think it is, and how we describe it. As Saussure would have it, language does not have, built within it, a series or chain of referents that allow definite meanings, and since this is the case, meaning becomes necessarily arbitrary, never absolutely present to us. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1973), p. 20.
- 30.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 158. One should read this in a radical way. There is no “outside.” Deconstruction doesn’t simply respond to questions posed within (a l’interieur) metaphysics “in order to go outside” (as we saw in his early work), but now is a kind of invitation, or as Lawlor puts it, “the keeping of a promise to a specter who needs to come inside, and thereby form a community.” Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University press, 2002), p. 221.
- 31.
Ibid., p. 34. Yet as Caputo puts it “From Plato to Husserl, the subject/agent signifies a certain ‘intending,’ a ‘vouloire-dire,’ a wanting-to-say, a meaning-to-say, wanting, meaning, and willing well-being. Otherwise the subject/agent would never do a thing, nothing would happen or eventuate.” John D. Caputo, “A Commentary: Deconstruction in a Nutshell” in Deconstruction in a Nutshell, ed. John D. Caputo (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), p. 144.
- 32.
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1973), p. 102. This voluntarism is also related with motivation (Motivierung). Derrida is convinced that in Husserl’s phenomenology there is a “unity” within the indicative function, which is held together “by a certain ‘motivation’ (Motivierung): it is what moves something such as a ‘thinking being’ to pass by thought from something to something else.” Ibid., p. 28.
- 33.
Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1982), p. 297.
- 34.
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1973), p. 85.
- 35.
Ibid., p. 104.
- 36.
Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. D. Cairns (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 118.
- 37.
Recalling the Scholastic notion of the word, “transcendentals” are categories, which “applied to any being whatsoever,” transcend “all determinations of type and genus,” are thus universal and as such are non-contingent. In reference to structures of cognition, they make knowledge possible. Husserl carries forward a Kantian understanding of this term, suggesting that though “phenomenological transcendental philosophy is distinguished from all historical philosophies” there is nonetheless “an obvious essential relationship” between it “and the transcendental philosophy of Kant.” Edmund Husserl, “Kant and the Idea of Transcendental Philosophy,” trans. Ted E. Klein JR and William E. Pohl, The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 5.3 (1974): p. 9 & 13. See also Matheson Russell, Husserl: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York, NY: Continuum Press, 2006), p. 39 & 42–43. Husserl indeed uses this word “transcendental” similarly to Kant. In CPR Kant suggests that he entitles “transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects in so far as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori. A system of such concepts might be entitled transcendental philosophy.” Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason (trans F. Max Müller. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), A 11 f., B 25.
- 38.
The category of “the transcendental,” here, should not be confused with the theological notion of “transcendence.” “Trancendental” carries a “sense of world-transcendence.” Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, Vol I, trans W.R. Boyce Gibson (New York, NY: MacMillan Company, 1931), p. 161.
- 39.
Ibid., p. 154.
- 40.
This consciousness is accessed through the performance of a reduction: a mental glimpse or vision that occurs in and by a momentary suspension of, and disconnection from nature and the “immanent” world. Like panning for gold, the residuum of such an endeavor is the absolute kernel of transcendental consciousness – the place where one might experience the world qua world in its “purity.”
- 41.
Ibid., p. 161.
- 42.
Ibid., p. 176.
- 43.
Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. William Alston and Georege Nakhnikian (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), p. 7.
- 44.
The word pure here refers to the nature of an experience as “unconditioned.” Ibid., p. 176, cf. 120.
- 45.
Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, Volume II, trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson (London England: Allen and Unwin, 1972), p. 52. Lévinas, who seems to be on good Husserlian ground here, claims that phenomenological intentionality allows one to get beyond merely experiencing a “representation” of an object, to seeing that it “connects the notion of consciousness to that of life, i.e., it leads us to consider consciousness under the rich and multiform aspects characteristic of our concrete existence.” See Emmanuel Lévinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. by André Orianne (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995), p. 53.
- 46.
Similarly, as Marrati interprets Derrida here, such an act is “only through an a priori synthesis that supposes a transcendental act that is itself synthetic.” Yet we are still left with the problem that synthesis implies “a duration and a genesis, the time of an actualization.” Paola Marrati, Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 6.
- 47.
Jacques Derrida, Speech and phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1973), p. 65–66.
- 48.
Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 138.
- 49.
Ibid., p. 87.
- 50.
Lauer suggests that this can be seen especially in Husserl’s “Philosophy as Rigorous Science.”
Quentin Lauer, “Introduction,” in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers. 1965), p. 76.
- 51.
Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 139.
- 52.
As Marrati notes, the question of origins “is the very question of the relation of time and truth” as “Genesis always refers to the absolute emergence of an originary sense, insofar as it is irreducible to anything that precedes it.” Paola Marrati, Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 3
- 53.
Edmund Husserl, quoted in Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 130, note 7.
- 54.
Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 132.
- 55.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott (Digireads.com Publishing, 2006), p. 84.
- 56.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin, 1965), p. 126–28.
- 57.
Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 128.
- 58.
To use a phrase from Lacoste here, such questions “carry their own answers ready and waiting in their bosoms.” Though Lacoste situates himself primarily in the phenomenological tradition, he too, like Marion, has been greatly influenced by Derrida, for in speaking of the hermeneutic circle, Lacoste suggests that “we can learn only to the extent that we can let the unanticipated put our expectations and our prejudices in question. Authentic discovery punches a hole in the circle, since only pseudo-questions carry their own answers ready and waiting in their bosoms. Pre-understanding without honest admission of non-understanding will hardly invite more than the most meagre discoveries. Yet it is necessary for questions to be asked, and that means there must be a field of dialogue where the speech that answers my questions can become my very own speech. Who am I, that the speech of theology addressed to me, however rudely, is capable of securing my adherence? Equally, how must theological speech be framed if what it offers has to serve as an answer to a question?” Jean Yves Lacoste, “More Haste, Less Speed in Theology,” The International Journal of Systematic Theology, 9:3, (2007): p. 273, (my emphasis).
- 59.
Such a teleology has vast effects on how one conceives of time for, as Marrati contents, “to think time as the unfolding of a teleology amounts to effacing its temporal character, to endowing it with a sense independent of it.” Paola Marrati, Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 6.
- 60.
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1973), p. 36.
- 61.
Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 132.
- 62.
Ibid., p. 128.
- 63.
Such a reference to the “great noon” conjures Nietzsche’s “God is dead.” The reference to the “impossible” is connected to “the promise,” which, as Lawlor asserts, “is based on sovereignty. And sovereignty – without a master over, Godless – is a sign, for Nietzsche, of the overman.” See also Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University press, 2002), p. 214.
- 64.
Jacques Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Phenomenology. trans. Marian Hobson (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. 2003), p. 153. Though originally written in 1953–54, it has undergone multiple changes and editions.
- 65.
Ibid., p. 161.
- 66.
Ibid., p. 161.
- 67.
Ibid., p. 161.
- 68.
Ibid., p. 161.
- 69.
Ibid., p. 10.
- 70.
Ibid., p. 10.
- 71.
Derrida continues to explicate this problem, suggesting that “these intentional referrals are in principle infinite and, to that degree, never take on the absolute of their sense…” and “an eidetic analysis must suppose the absolute of sense to be already known, and institute the absolute intentional sense and the transcendental activity on the threshold of passivity itself by a decree or a certainty of an exception and nonphenomenological type.” Ibid., p. 144.
- 72.
Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, 5th edition, (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1968), p. 141, then on p. 201.
- 73.
Ibid., p. 141, cf. 201.
- 74.
Or as Horner puts it, “the given” is the object in the “horizon of the phenomenologically reduced consciousness.” Robyn Horner, Rethinking God as Gift: Marion, Derrida, and the Limits of Phenomenology (New York, NY: Fordham Press, 2001), p. 24.
- 75.
Every presentation, as Horner interprets, “involves the temporally divisive movements of re-presentation and appresentation.” Robyn Horner, Rethinking God as Gift: Marion, Derrida, and the Limits of Phenomenology (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2001), p. 25. See also Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1973), p. 7.
- 76.
Jacques Derrida, Speech and phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1973), p. 53.
- 77.
Ibid., p. 68.
- 78.
Ibid., p. 156.
- 79.
Derrida learns of these concerns from Heidegger, to whom Derrida ultimately redirects this criticism. Derrida contends that one must begin with the understanding that “absence” – not simply presence – is equally necessary for our understandings of “being.” As Heidegger puts it, “the ancient interpretation of the being of beings” is influenced by “the determination of the sense of being as… presence.” The entirety of the philosophical history of metaphysics is plagued by the view that beings are “grasped in” a “being present,” and thus determined by this mode of temporality. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1967), p. 25.
- 80.
Or as Lawlor conceives of it, “the unseen examples are appresented on the basis of the seen even though we realize that we will never see them all.” Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University press, 2002), p. 164.
- 81.
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1973), p. 5.
- 82.
Ibid., p. 51.
- 83.
Ibid., p. 101, p. 51. See also p. 67, where Derrida similarly insists that “the ideality of the form of presence itself implies that it be infinitely re-peatable, that its re-turn, as a return of the same, is necessary ad infinitum and is inscribed in presence itself.”
- 84.
Ibid., p. 68.
- 85.
Ibid., p. 68 & p. 104.
- 86.
Ibid., p. 101.
- 87.
The metaphysics of presence presumes “sense” as presence.
- 88.
Jacques Derrida, L’Écriture et la Différence (Paris: Seuil. 1967), or Writing and Difference,. trans. by Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 159/108 cf. 154/104.
- 89.
Ibid., p. 197/134.
- 90.
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1973), p. 9.
- 91.
Any kind of valorization of that which is presented through “perception” is privileged over that which is non-present. As briefly mentioned, this is similar to the critique he levels towards Hegel. Derrida demands that Hegel privileges the issue of “sight” as the ideal sense, which is indicative of Hegel’s position on desire. Derrida claims that for Hegel, sight “gives its sense to theory. It suspends desire, lets things be, reserves or forbids their consummation.” Further, Hegel’s theory of desire is “the theory of the contradiction between theory and desire. Theory is the death of desire, death in desire, if not the desire of death. The entire introduction to the Aesthetics demonstrates this contradiction between desire (Begierde), which pushes toward consummation, and ‘theoretical interest,’ which lets things be in their freedom.” This raises a number of questions concerning desire, once again. To what degree is Hegel’s “desire” to be taken as this effort to bring things into “consummation,” or, put otherwise, into presence? Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1982), p. 92 & p. 92 n. 20.
- 92.
See Jacques Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. Leonard Lawlor (Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010).
- 93.
This is especially true of the “early” Derrida, who was interested in showing how signification can be at work without its being represented and how signs become intelligible to us. See also Sloterdijk’s Derrida, an Egyptian, where the argument is made that Derrida’s writing leaves a kind of “pyramid” of archives. Every act of writing is an attempt to memorialize an active, lively signification, and when one “signifies” one “divinely” creates. Peter Sloterdijk, Derrida, an Egyptian: On the Problem of the Jewish Pyramid, (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2009).
- 94.
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1973), p. 25.
- 95.
Ibid., p. 30.
- 96.
Husserl’s “expression and indication” are interestingly similar to Frege’s “sense and reference.”
- 97.
And Derrida ultimately concludes “it is more and more clear that despite the initial distinction between an indicative sign and an expressive sign, only an indication is truly a sign for Husserl.” Ibid., p. 42.
- 98.
Ibid., p. 24. Yet in asking about the “sign in general” one must take care so as not to elevate “the question of the sign to an ontological plane.”
- 99.
Ibid., p. 23.
- 100.
Ibid., p. 21.
- 101.
Ibid., p. 31.
- 102.
Plato, The Symposium, ed Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1989), C-E, 199. As Cobb suggests, Socrates argues that “Love is the sort of thing that requires an object. Just as one cannot simply be a father or a sister, but must be the father or the sister of someone, so one cannot just love, period. One must love something. Hence, love is always ‘of something’ (199 c-e). Moreover, the something is necessarily something that one does not have. (200a).” William S. Cobb, Plato’s Erotic Dialogues (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), p. 70.
- 103.
The theme of the “to-come” is also used in reference to the “promise.” To promise is to speak on behalf of the “to come,” or to send in advance. Texts and languages exemplify this, always making promises that cannot be fulfilled. This, of course, entails a certain relationship with temporality. The promise is contextualized in Spectres of Marx through a radicalization of the idea of “the messianic” relation whereby one is always in waiting for that which never comes. This waiting for the to-come is a “messianism without religion.” Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York & London: Routledge, 1994), p. 59.
- 104.
Jacques Derrida, “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event” in The Late Derrida, eds. W. J. T. Mitchell and Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 237.
- 105.
Ibid., p. 237.
- 106.
Jacques Derrida, Points …: Interviews, 1974–1994, ed Elisabeth Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 239.
- 107.
“The very condition of a deconstruction may be at work, in the work, within the system to be deconstructed; It may already be located there, already at work, not at the center, but in an eccentric center, in a corner whose eccentricity assures the solid concentration of the system, participating in the construction of what it, at the same time, threatens to deconstruct. One might then be inclined to reach this conclusion: deconstruction is not an operation that supervenes afterwards, from the outside, one fine day; it is always already at work in the work;” And Derrida continues “Since the disruptive force of deconstruction is always already contained within the very architecture of the work, all one would finally have to do to be able to deconstruct, given this always already, is to do memory work. Since I want neither to accept nor to reject a conclusion formulated in these terms, let us leave this question hanging for a while.” Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul Deman (New York NY: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 73.
- 108.
Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 80. Derrida reminds that Schelling shows how the term sucht (though it directly translates to “search”) can be translated to mean something like “nostalgia,” which has its roots in obsession, illness, epidemic, and even evil. For Derrida, “this evil [desire for nostalgia] is inscribed in desire, and, like desire itself, it carries in it a motivity, an ‘adversed mobility’ (Gegenwendige Bewegtheit): go out of oneself and return into oneself.” Derrida continues in his reading of this kind of “evil” as it relates to what Heidegger suggests of “spirit,” which seeks to go out and return to itself in a similar nostalgic fashion.
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Alvis, J.W. (2016). Indifference: Derrida Beyond Husserl, Intentionality, and Desire. In: Marion and Derrida on The Gift and Desire: Debating the Generosity of Things. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 85. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27942-8_5
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