Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

mains “self-effacing before the originality and primordiality of meanings” (Writing 155 ). We all perceive, we all think: Husser ...

The fascinating question that Husserl encounters in a work like the “Origin of Geometry” is, as he puts it, “the prob- lem of th ...

the historical source of the objectivity necessary to science and mathematics, comes under fire in Derrida’s “Genesis and Struct ...

edge and everyday life. Geometry, for Derrida as for Husserl, offers an example of ideas that change the world, that change expe ...

objectively true, and the ready-made opinions and prejudices of “the whole modern age” ( 169 ). Husserl calls upon science as th ...

analysis, on which a study of Freud’s personality sheds much light.) The introduction contains a startling digression on, of all ...

cannot match. Joyce’s reliance on many-faceted ambiguous meaning remains secondary to Husserl’s effort at solid trans- parency. ...

ance in 1966 at the Johns Hopkins Sciences of Man symposium (an event I will return to in the next chapter). The year 1967 was J ...

on indication as its vehicle. Indications can be expressions if they have been selected by someone in order to convey a meaning. ...

oneself as speaking, and even as speaking to one- self, as, e.g., when someone says to himself: “You have gone wrong, you can’t ...

ciding to put one foot in front of the other. When we dwell on our decision to take a particular step and tell ourselves that we ...

requires signs, whether verbal or gestural. In his argument, indication takes over the realm of expression. For Husserl, by cont ...

velops slowly in Derrida’s work, and is related to the impor- tance of linguistic signs, since Derrida tends to identify the se- ...

tention to the context of the moment shows that he is not the simplistic adherent of self-presence that Derrida claims he is. Hu ...

hood. He even describes indication as “the process of death at work in signs” (Speech 40 ). For Derrida everything is a sign, wh ...

objects he was able to describe—does not prevent a text from ‘meaning’ something. On the contrary, this possibility gives birth ...

that “there is an unfailing complicity between idealization and speech” in Husserl (Speech 75 ); but Husserl simply does not emp ...

turns Husserl into a representative of one-sided Neoplatonic idealism, determined to float free of actual experience. But the st ...

earlier work on Husserl. No longer would he make the bold literary experimentalism of writers like Joyce and Mallarmé yield prio ...

cized avant-garde. Writers and thinkers reckoned with the sometimes chaotic discontent of the times and instilled an ar- dent en ...