on the basis of its original premises. The permanence of a dis-
cipline like geometry consists in the way it offers possibility for
new knowledge, for development, but still remains the same
discipline.
As the catastrophe of Nazism encircled the Europe of the
1930 s, Husserl yearned after a rational continuity in the life of
nations that would be analogous to the lucid power of sci-
entific knowledge. He hoped for a revival of philosophical rea-
son in its noblest forms. This reawakening of reason, linked by
Husserl to the idea of Europe as the home of science, was, as he
saw it, the only way out of the growing insanity of nationalist
ideology. Husserl wrote in a diary entry in 1906 , “I have been
through enough torments from lack of clarity and from doubt
that wavers back and forth....Only one need absorbs me: I
must win clarity, else I cannot live; I cannot bear life unless I
can believe that I shall achieve it.”^12
For all Husserl’s influence on Derrida, it is hard to imag-
ine a passage more inimical to the deconstructionist point of
view than Husserl’s diary entry, with its wholehearted, and
rather desperate, declaration of faith in clear truth. Derrida ar-
gues against Husserl’s fervent wish for a clarity that we can
trust. He spurns the quest for certainty that has animated phi-
losophy since its beginnings in ancient Greece. Instead, he fa-
vors constant ambiguity. Derrida wants to frustrate certainty;
he chooses to celebrate diversions and digressions. Husserl, by
contrast, wants with all his being to get to the core: the un-
known but knowable basis of all our experience. In this sense,
Husserl provides a perfect foil for Derrida, since he represents
philosophy’s attachment to the ideal of certain truth. Derrida
sees the phenomenologist’s hunger for such truth as fearful
and defensive: a flight from différance.
Husserl does, in fact, have his defensive side. A number of
40 From Algeria to the École Normale