Abstract
This chapter traces how Derrida’s philosophical practice—deconstruction—emerges in his earliest writings on phenomenology as a name for a new form of social-historical reflection. The book’s study of Derrida’s philosophy of institutions begins here because Derrida goes on to redeploy the notion of “historicity” that he finds in phenomenology in order to theorize social and political institutions in his later works. The chapter begins with a reading of Derrida’s Specters of Marx that explores how Derrida in the 1990s came to reactivate his early writings on the themes of history, historicity, and historicism in phenomenological philosophy for the purposes of social and political critique. The chapter develops this account of Derrida’s early works through novel readings of his commentary on Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry,” his 1964–1965 seminar on Heidegger, and his early engagement with Michel Foucault’s History of Madness. Taking issue with a standard reading of the Derrida/Foucault debate, the chapter repositions Derrida as not so much an antagonist of the Foucaultian project of institutional critique, as attempting to to clarify the methodological conditions of developing a philosophical critique of institutions through his engagement with Foucault.
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Notes
- 1.
My analysis in this section of the chapter builds upon recent attempts to revisit the Foucault/Derrida debate on more productive grounds, building on work collected in the volume Foucault/Derrida: Fifty Years Later: The Futures of Genealogy, Deconstruction, and Politics and in particular Samir Haddad’s “A Petty Pedagogy? Teaching Philosophy in Derrida’s ‘Cogito and the History of Madness,’” in its attempt to reframe each side of the debate from the standpoint of Foucault and Derrida’s respective visions of the status of philosophy, as well as Thomas Khurana’s “The Common Root of Meaning and Nonmeaning: Derrida, Foucault, and the Transformation of the Transcendental Question,” in its assertion that Foucault and Derrida’s agon boils down to where each of these thinkers falls on the side of a debate about the status of transcendental philosophy. The present chapter builds on this work by situating the Foucault/Derrida exchange in the context not only of Derrida’s affiliation with transcendental phenomenology but also more broadly his interest in the question of institutions.
- 2.
The present study builds upon Leonard Lawlor’s Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology and its thesis, advanced through a close reading of several of Derrida’s writings on Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas, that Derrida’s early writings are preoccupied with the phenomenological problem of the genesis of sense. For Lawlor, while Derrida undoubtedly has critical things to say about Husserl, nevertheless the starting point for deconstruction is a certain phenomenology and “Derrida’s critique of phenomenology is always a critique of its teleology” (Lawlor 2002, 24) in particular, as opposed to a mere refutation of the phenomenological starting point for philosophy altogether. I differ from Lawlor, however, when he argues that Derrida “transform[s] this basic phenomenological problem of genesis into the problem of the sign (or the problem of language)” (2002, 22), in that this exclusive emphasis on language fails to locate the early Derrida’s much broader engagement with Husserl and with phenomenology as a reflection on history. The problem of the sign and language are undoubtedly Derrida’s point of entry to a degree here, but his critique and ultimate departure from phenomenology are not reducible to a difference with phenomenology as it relates to the question of language alone.
- 3.
Page references to “The Origin of Geometry” here refer to the reprinting of this essay in the English translation of Derrida’s Introduction.
- 4.
Husserl’s “principle of all principles” in Ideas I is perhaps the best distillation of this core commitment of phenomenology: “Enough now of absurd theories. No conceivable theory can make us err with respect to the principle of all principles: that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily (so to speak, in its ‘personal’ actuality) offered to us in ‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there” (Husserl 1982, 44).
- 5.
As Husserl puts it in “Philosophy as Rigorous Science”: “Science is a title standing for absolute, timeless values. Each value, once discovered, belongs thereafter to the treasure trove of all succeeding humanity and obviously determines likewise the material content of the idea of culture, wisdom, Weltanschauung, as well as of philosophy” (Husserl 1965, 191).
- 6.
In an eloquent passage in the “Origin,” Husserl will speak about the sense of history that accompanies every geometrical intuition as a feature of its style: “Geometry necessarily has this mobility and has a horizon of geometrical future in precisely this style; this is its meaning for every geometer who has the consciousness (the constant implicit knowledge) of existing within a forward development understood as the progress of knowledge being built into the horizon. The same thing is true of every science (Husserl 1989, 159).
- 7.
As Husserl puts it: “[…] to understand geometry or any given cultural fact is to be conscious of its historicity, albeit implicitly” (Husserl 1989, 173).
- 8.
In this vein, Derrida lays particular stress on Husserl’s notion of Rückfrage or “return inquiry” as the approach one needs to adopt when attempting to “read” geometry as a historical phenomenon: “[…] by a necessity which is no less than an accidental and exterior fate. […] I must start with ready-made geometry, such as is now in circulation and which I can always phenomenologically read, in order to go back through it and question the sense of its origin. Thus, both thanks to and despite the sedimentations, I can restore history to its traditional diaphaneity. Husserl here speaks of Rückfrage, a notion no doubt current enough, but which now takes on a sharp and precise sense. We have translated it by return inquiry (question en retour). Like its German synonym, return inquiry (and question en retour as well), is marked by the postal and epistolary reference or resonance of a communication from a distance. Like Rückfrage, return inquiry is asked on the basis of a first posting. From a received and already readable document, the possibility is offered me of asking again, and in return, about the primordial and final intention of what has been given me by tradition. The latter, which is only mediacy itself and openness to telecommunication in general, is then, as Husserl says, “open … to continued inquiry” (Derrida 1989, 50).
- 9.
As Derrida documents in “‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology,” another important essay from this period, in his estimation, this genesis-structure problem animates Husserl’s project from beginning to end and “leaves every major stage of phenomenology unbalanced” (Derrida 1978a, 157). For example, what distinguishes Husserl’s project in his early Philosophy of Arithmetic is that, on the one hand, Husserl insists on the ideality of mathematical objects—their non-dependence on experience—while, on the other hand, Husserl believes that an account must be given of the “concrete genesis” (1978a, 157) that makes mathematics as a tradition of knowledge possible, i.e., the institution of mathematics. For Husserl, in other words, there can be no empirical-psychological deduction of number, for that would be to misunderstand the very sense of what a number is, and yet our explanation of number must account for its concrete genesis: “Husserl, for his part, seeks to maintain simultaneously the normative autonomy of logical or mathematical ideality as concerns all factual consciousness, and its original dependence in relation to a subjectivity in general; in general, but concretely. Thus he had to navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of logicizing structuralism and psychologistic geneticism. […] He had to open up a new direction of philosophical attention and permit the discovery of a concrete, but nonempirical, intentionality, a ‘transcendental experience’ which would be ‘constitutive,’ that is, like all intentionality, simultaneously productive and revelatory, active and passive. This original unity, the common root of activity and passivity is from quite early on the very possibility of meaning for Husserl” (1978a, 158).
- 10.
As he puts it in the “Genesis and Structure” essay, for Derrida, Husserl’s commitment to this idea of Reason “force[s] Husserl to transgress the purely descriptive space and transcendental pretention of his research, and to move toward a metaphysics of history in which the solid structure of a Telos would permit him to reappropriate, by making it essential and by in some way prescribing its horizon, an untamed genesis which grew to greater and greater expanse, and seemed to accommodate itself less and less to phenomenological apriorism and to transcendental idealism” (1989, 157).
- 11.
Derrida encapsulates this problem of language in the second session of the seminar as follows: “Whence are we to draw the concepts, the terms, the forms of linking necessary for the discourse of Destruction, for the destructive discourse? Clearly we cannot borrow them simply from the tradition that we are in the process of deconstructing; we cannot simply take them up again, that much is obvious. But neither can we, because destruction is not a demolition or an annihilation, erase them or abandon them in some conceptual storage room, as definitively outdated instruments. Because Destruktion is in its gesture like a Wiederholung, a repetition, it can neither use, nor simply deprive itself of the traditional logos. Simply to deprive oneself of it would be ‘precisely’ to give to traditionalism a meaning that is exactly the one that Heidegger does not want and that belongs to a moment of metaphysics—namely, the meaning of a beginning again from zero in the ahistorical style of Descartes or perhaps (things are less simple) of Husserl. […] Heidegger cannot and precisely does not want to accept the comfort of this ahistorical radicalism and, planning to destroy the history of ontology and ontology, he is always vigilant in making the most radical question of being and the most radical historicity communicate intrinsically and essentially” (2016, 23–24).
- 12.
As Derrida puts it: “In spite of the proximity between this Hegelian relation to the history of philosophy and the Heideggerian relation to the history of philosophy, there remains a decisive difference over which I would like to pause for a moment, to verify for the first time but not the last that, as is indicated by Heidegger’s itinerary and the increasing number of his references to Hegel, it is in the difference between Hegel and Heidegger that our problem is situated” (2016, 6).
- 13.
In this vein, Derrida also hearkens back in the seminar to the critique of Husserl that he had developed in the closing pages of his commentary on “The Origin of Geometry”: “And you can see clearly that to the extent that Husserl’s attempt remains Cartesian, that it determines historicity on the basis of the Telos of philosophy as science, that it accords the purest historicity to the exact sciences, that it remains a philosophy of the constituting subject, and so on, it indeed does belong to the age of the world-picture. It is enclosed in it. And to the extent that it does not think this closure as such, the historicity it is talking about is not historicity itself but a determination, an epoch of historicity itself, however immense and present this epoch might be. It was during this Weltbild that Husserl was able, in a necessary but limited gesture, to criticize Dilthey’s thesis of Weltanschauung” (2016, 132). Heidegger’s claim, as Derrida reads him, in other words, is that Husserl’s commitment to the idea of philosophy as rigorous science, although the lever of his critique of historicism, ultimately causes him to betray his own descriptions of historicity.
- 14.
In contrast with Koopman’s characterization of this debate Khurana (2016) rightly observes in this vein that “Derrida and Foucault cannot be opposed in the way their debate suggests: as the conflict of a traditional philosophical program […] and a positivist, historicist program. […] Instead, we are confronted with the conflict of two closely related transformations of the transcendental approach that strive to account for and enable a critical history of reason and unreason” (97).
- 15.
Here Derrida, although he is ultimately critical of Husserl’s account of the sign, in fact closely echoes Husserl, who, in the Logical Investigations, asserts that the formal structure of an expression requires some intentional object even if no such object actually exists or could not possibly exist empirically.
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Gustafson, R.A. (2023). Of Historicity: The Theme of Deconstruction (1962–1967). In: Derrida's Social Ontology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41494-7_2
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