How Not to Read: Derrida on Husserl* Kevin Mulligan
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How Not to Read: Derrida on Husserl* Kevin Mulligan Topoi 10:199—208, 1991. © 1991 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. Topos: Continental Philosophy Analysed 1. Promises and presence Jacques Derrida’s slim monograph La Voix et le Phénomène (Speech and Phenomena)i appeared in 1967. Its subject matter is indicated and expressed by its subtitle: Introduction au problème du signe dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (Introduction to the problem of Signs in Husserl’s Phenomenology). It is of interest for at least the following reasons. It deals with distinctions in the philosophy of language and of logic that had been developed by Husserl in the first of his Logical Investigationsii (1900/ 01) and have become part and parcel of exact twentieth century philosophy of language. lt marks the beginning of an approach to philosophy, or at least to philosophical texts, that has been very influential. lt deals with early ideas of Husserl that, according to Derrida, were incorporated into the latter’s later Transcendental Phenomenology, which in turn is held by Derrida to be inseparable from the “philosophy of différance”. Finally, unlike nearly all of Derrida’s subsequent writings it often stays within the limits of a recognisable philosophical genre, one which involves one philosopher critically examining what another philosopher says. At least in his 1967 monograph Derrida admits to such familiar ambitions as demonstrating contradictory and untenable positions within the system of another philosopher (VP, 64; SP, 57). Although, as we shall see, his is no simple reading of Husserl. In what follows 1 shall examine some of Derrida’s comments on Husserl’s first Investigation and argue that the French philosopher fails to make clear the relation between his own theses and suggestions and those of the Austrian philosopher he examines, in spite of the fact that he insists on using just Husserl’s theses and terminology in order to formulate his own views; and that, where objections and criticisms are advanced, they are extraordinarily weak. Finally, in the most speculative part of my paper (§3) I shall suggest that a garbled version of an idea of Husserl’s that is to be found in Derrida’s 1967 monograph may well throw light on the “structure” of the philosophy of deconstruction and “différance”.iii By way of introduction some remarks on two general points are in order. First, Derrida’s view that Husserl’s later transcendental philosophy incorporates much of his earlier philosophy and hence, presumably, also those elements in the latter that Derrida finds lacking. Second, the constellation formed by Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology, Heidegger and Derrida’s own views. Derrida’s assumption that with respect to problems of signification and language “a patient reading of the Investigations would show the germinal structure of the whole of Husserl’s thought” (VP, 1, 51; SP, 3, 47), the suggestion that the machinery of Transcendental Phenomenology is already implicitly present in the Investigations, is a strange suggestion for Derrida to make. He seems to be tempted not at all by the hypothesis that there is a “rupture”, a “break”, a “difference” between the earlier and the later Husserl. The fact that Husserl himself seems to have shared Derrida’s view about the teleology of his development might well be adduced against the hypothesis of a break. But presumably Derrida of all people would not want his claim to rest on the word of the author. And indeed Derrida conceives of his examination of Husserl’s text as providing evidence for the teleological view. 1 The constellation of Derrida, Heidegger and the later Husserl furnishes Derrida’s monograph with some of its most important leitmotivs. Derrida himself points out that he appeals to “Heideggerian motifs in decisive places” (VP, 114; SP, 74). One such motif is Death. Heidegger in Sein und Zeit had, amongst other things, transformed Husserl’s descriptions of our mental life by giving these a much more vital colouring; in particular he had described our relation to Death as in some sense essential to our lives. Two features of this transformation which make it so difficult to follow are the use Heidegger makes of distortions of bits of ordinary German — particularly nominalisations of prepositions — and his extensive use of a large number of the obscurer philosophemes (big words) of the tradition. The fact that Husserl never indulged in either idiom, even when his philosophy had come to bear a striking resemblance to some of the positions of the German Idealists, has made it even more difficult to see at what points, and how, Heidegger thought he was going beyond Husserl. Now part of the promise and appeal of VP is that Derrida seems to hope to bring out, without respect to one of the most developed parts of Husserl’s philosophy, just what its shortcomings are in the light of Heidegger’s philosophy, as suitably radicalised by Derrida himself. Thus where Heidegger puts Death in the centre of life Derrida advances a much more specific version of this claim in his attempts to display the rôle of Death in our uses of signs (VP, 60; SP, 54). Precisely because this claim is more specific than its Heideggerian ancestor it promises to be easier to get a handle on. A second motif is Presence. It is not easy to say just what the Metaphysics of Presence is; it seems fairly clear that it is a Bad Thing; that many philosophers have suffered from it, especially Husserl; that even Heidegger was not immune but that Derrida thinks he has diagnosed it, with some help from the latter. Although a Bad Thing, it is inescapable. That is why an examination of a philosophy pervaded by the philosophy of presence in a particularly pure form, that of Husserl, promises to be illuminating. Symptoms of the Metaphysics of Presence are the tendencies to put any or all of the following notions at the centre of a philosophical system: the presence to a subject — Cartesian, empirical, transcendental — of his mental states or their contents; the presence to a subject of ideal entities such as Meanings, the presence to a subject of the temporal present in or at which his mental states or their contents or associated idealities are present to him. Where these notions are not only at the centre of a philosophical system but are also systematically interconnected, as in Husserl, then we have the disease in as pure a form as we are likely to get it. Further glimpses of the Metaphysics of Presence will be vouchsafed to the reader who follows through Derrida’s detailed accounts of its ravages in Husserl’s philosophy of language. There is certainly some vague sense in which Derrida, like Quine or Wittgenstein, has been concerned to criticise a number of pervasive and traditional mentalist and Platonist assumptions. Like many other twentieth century philosophers Derrida has worried about the presuppositions behind the easy traditional talk of an idea or a representation being present to or before or in the mind. And like an even greater number of philosophers he is not prepared to accept without further ado the accounts by philosophical “Platonists” of the distinction between temporal and ideal entities and of their interrelations. But the existence of such widespread convergences at the level of concerns and conclusions is of little philosophical interest. What would be of philosophical interest would be an argument, a demonstration that some of Husserl’s mentalist and “Platonist” views are wrong. Such an argument presupposes a clear grasp of these views and an account of the relation between the critical view and what is criticized. Let us then see whether Derrida provides such an account and supplies some such argument. 2 Husserl’s account of a number of distinctions is, according to Derrida, undermined by his commitment to the Metaphysics of Presence. Among the distinctions in question are those: between what is and what is not a sign, between linguistic signs and non-linguistic signs, between expression and indication, between what is and what is not ideal, between subject and object, between grammaticalness and non-grammaticalness, between pure and empirical grammaticalness, between pure, general grammaticalness and pure logical grammaticalness, between intention and intuition (VP, 113; SP, 101). 2. Imagination unbound Of all the distinctions in the above list it is the third and fourth, between indication and expression and between what is and is not ideal, that most interest Derrida. And in what follows I shall concentrate on what he says about these two distinctions with only a passing glance at the last distinction on the list. Husserl’s account of the expression/indication distinction goes roughly — I omit some details — as follows. If Sam communicates to Maria that Paris is in France by asserting “Paris is in France” then, whereas what he says or expresses is that Paris is in France, what he indicates, manifests or intimates is that he judges that Paris is in France. Thus what is expressed is not identical with what is indicated. Sam’s expressing that Paris is in France is a propositionally articulated act of meaning (bedeuten), which is bound up with an act of judging and which is complex: it contains acts of naming and an act of predicating. Each of these three “meaning giving acts” and each of the linguistic tokens on which they “confer” meaning instantiates (ist ein Einzelfall von) a ghostly “Platonic” counterpart, an ideal species.iv On Husserl’s first provisional account of the distinction between expression and indication (LI I, §§1—10) the former is a relation between a cognitive subject, the sentence token he employs and the meaning acts accompanying the latter and its parts, whereas indication is a relation between these three terms and an interlocutor.