empty strivers yearning for fullness. In Sartre’s terms, we are
each the for-itself that wants to be in-itself. Yet Sartre insists on
what Derrida denies: that we can at least achieve the authen-
ticity of the striver, as we focus our aim on a human goal.^9
Sartre and Derrida share a diagnosis of the human con-
dition as the pursuit of certainty and stability in an unreliable,
inconstant world. But Derrida was always more attracted to
Sartre’s influence, Husserl, because Husserl avoids the psycho-
logical approach that Sartre relies on.^10 Husserl’s more rarified
perspective appealed to Derrida because Husserl, in his quest
for a truly impersonal theory, avoids the entanglement with
ideas of heroic authenticity and political commitment so char-
acteristic of Sartre.
Derrida wants a role for the philosopher freed from
Sartrean melodrama: he wishes philosophy to achieve a suffi-
cient detachment from the turmoil of its time, and from
human pathology in general. Husserl, who in this respect is an
important guide for Derrida, argues against the entwining of
psychology and philosophy that is so apparent in Plato, Nietz-
sche, and Freud. As I discuss in the next chapter, Derrida
would recognize the pressures of his era in the late sixties and
respond to them by adopting, at times, a voice of prophetic ex-
hortation reminiscent of the youth movement. But until then,
he took his stand as a critic of metaphysics rather than a
Sartre-like analyst of twentieth-century humanity.
Sartre, then, is less important for Derrida than the phe-
nomenologist Husserl and the nineteenth-century idealist
Hegel. As Dermot Moran suggests, Husserl and Hegel are the
definitive philosophers for Derrida. (Martin Heidegger comes
a close third.)^11 In his early career, Derrida chooses Husserl
over Hegel because Husserl allows him to retain a distance
from history. Rather than deciding on the relation between
From Algeria to the École Normale 29