the historical source of the objectivity necessary to science and
mathematics, comes under fire in Derrida’s “Genesis and
Structure.” But Derrida remains ambivalent on this question,
as he acknowledges the necessity, the true importance, of
Husserl’s project. He suggests that Husserl’s inclination to as-
sociate structure and genesis, to link scientific truth with the
culture that discovered it, might well illuminate the character
of our knowledge. Derrida refuses to unmask Husserl as a
mere ethnocentric European. Instead, he implies, rather un-
easily, that thought is unavoidably allied to its cultural sur-
roundings. Europe remains, then, the home of objectivity,
much as we might squirm at the ethnic favoritism such an idea
conveys. Derrida implies that Husserl, instead of just exhibit-
ing the symptoms of our inevitable tendency to connect gene-
sis with structure, genuinely helps us to understand this con-
nection. And yet Derrida does not go further, though we want
him to; he does not explain what the understanding is, exactly.
The nature of Husserl’s discovery, and of Derrida’s atti-
tude toward it, remains unclear in the early “Genesis and Struc-
ture.” We can surmise, though, that Derrida is sympathetic to
Husserl’s effort. We will see in the next chapter how Derrida
faults Foucault for being an unrepentant historicist. Husserl,
by contrast, remains valuable to Derrida because he combines
a sense of historical origins with a universalizing emphasis—
even if Husserl (like Derrida) is unable to fully explicate the
combination.
In 1962 , Derrida continued his work on Husserl with an
introduction to the “Origin of Geometry.” Husserl’s essay on
geometry is twenty-three pages long; Derrida’s introduction
occupies over a hundred pages. Derrida was finding in Husserl
what the other philosophers of the École Normale looked for
in Marxist politics: an epochal intersection between knowl-
44 From Algeria to the École Normale