Abstract
In the Logical Investigations, Edmund Husserl argues that a proper understanding of logic requires that one distinguish between the indicative function which signs, including linguistic signs, can have from the expressive function which only linguistic signs can have. This is important for a proper understanding of logic, since that discipline is concerned only with the meanings expressed by linguistic signs. While linguistic signs can exercise both functions, and indeed in communication they exercise both functions simultaneously, Husserl argues that even when both are present, the two functions can be distinguished from one another, and he thinks that in soliloquy we find the expressive function unaccompanied by the indicative function.
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References
Derrida, Jacques. La Voix et le Phénomène (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), 107. Speech and Phenomena, translated by David Allison, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 96. Further references to this text will be abbreviated as “SP” followed by the French/English pagination.
Husserl, Edmund. Logische Untersuchungen (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1968),IL1, 24/1. Logical Investigations, translated by J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 269, trans, altered). Further references to this text will be abbreviated as followed by the German/English pagination.
Derrida translates Husserl’s “bedeuten” with the French phrase “vouloir-dire, ” which does indeed mean “to mean,” but more literally means “to want to say,” and Derrida deliberately appeals to this latter meaning (cf. SP, 17–18/17–18 and 35–36/33; also see J. Claude Evans, Strategies ofReconstruction: Derrida and the Myth of the Voice [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991] Chapters 2 and 4).
Findlay translates both Beweisen and Hinweisen as “demonstration. ” I have followed Dorion Cairns’ suggestion of “pointing, ” though Derrida’s suggestion of “allusion indicative” or “indicative allusion” is elegant.
In order to make this clear, Derrida offers his own translation of Husserl’s definition of the indicative sign, since the French translation of the Investigations translates Bestand as “réalité,” and this has led to some rather confusing moments in translations of La Voix et le Phénomène. Allison’s English translation quite properly has Derrida writing that “Husserl intentionally uses very general concepts (Sein, Bestand), which may cover being or subsistence . . .” (SP, English translation 28). “Subsistence” in this passage translates Derrida’s “consistance,” which is Derrida’s translation of Bestand. But when, just a few lines later, Derrida offers his own French translation of Husserl’s definition, using “consistance” to translate “Bestand,” Allison uses Findlay’s translation, which has “reality” for “Bestand,” although Derrida has just pointed out (in an implicit criticism of the French translation which would hit Findlay’s translation equally) that in Husserl’s text Bestand is to be carefully distinguished from Realität. The German translation of Derrida’s text produces similar confusion, translating Derrida’s own phrase as “das Sein oder die Konsistenz” and then following that with Husserl’s original text, which has “Bestand. ”
Cairns, Dorion, Guide to Translating Husserl (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 20.
White, Alan. “Reconstructing Husserl: A Critical Response to Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena” Husserl Studies 4 (1987), 56–57. In his discussion White chooses to follow Findlay in translating “Hinweis” as “demonstration.”
The passage which Derrida quotes from 26 of the First Investigation begins “An essentially indicating character…” in the Findlay translation, which Allison takes over (LI II. 1, 85/1, 318, quoted at SP, 105/94). It should read, The essentially occasional character.
The passage which Derrida quotes from 26 of the First Investigation begins “An essentially indicating character...” in the Findlay translation, which Allison takes over (LI II. 1, 85/1, 318, quoted at SP, 105/94). It should read, “The essentially occasional character”
Derrida expresses amazement at Husserl’s appeal to an “individual concept.” This is surely a Leibnizian influence at work.
A more exhaustive analysis of this text would have to bring in Husserl’s distinctions between no less than thirteen different meanings of the word “Vorstellung.”
Robert Scholes has noted that Derrida “claims that what [Bertrand] Russell called the ‘trivial’ sense of the word is the only sense that counts.” (Robert Scholes, “Deconstruction and Communication,” Critical Inquiry 14 [1988], 290.)
Edmund Husserl, Formale und Transzendentale Logik, edited by Paul Janssen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974. [Husserliana Volume XVII]), 207. Formal and Transcendental Logic, translated by Dorion Cairns, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 199. Further references to this text will be abbreviated as “FTL” followed by the German/English pagination.
This line of analysis was extended by Aron Gurwitsch in his “Outlines of a Theory of ‘Essentially Occasional Expressions’,” in Marginal Consciousness, edited by Lester Embree (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985), 66f.
J. Claude Evans, Strategies of Deconstruction: Derrida and the Myth of the Voice, Chapter 6.
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Evans, J.C. (1995). Indication and Occasional Expressions. In: McKenna, W.R., Evans, J.C. (eds) Derrida and Phenomenology. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 20. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8498-2_3
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