requires signs, whether verbal or gestural. In his argument,
indication takes over the realm of expression. For Husserl, by
contrast, indication and expression may occur together, or
they may not; they do not contaminate each other. When Der-
rida, against Husserl, argues that expression is really indica-
tion, he contends that the material of indication—words and
gestures performed in time—insinuates itself into, and per-
manently colors, the thing indicated, the expression.
Derrida charges that Husserl wants a self for which mean-
ing is utterly present, constantly available (Strategies 108 ). But
despite Derrida’s claim, Husserl does not adhere to such a
simple view of the self and its meanings. For him, communi-
cable meaning is not, in fact, easily available: a gap remains be-
tween inward expression and social indication. Husserl sug-
gests that we are intimately related to our own thoughts, and
that it is therefore absurd to picture the self explicitly formu-
lating its every mental impulse. According to Husserl, I am
deeply mistaken if I think that I must constantly take silent
mental notes in order to think or perceive. (Such note taking,
occurring on an unconscious level, constitutes, in rough
terms, Derrida’s picture of the mind.)
For Derrida, Husserl’s belief in a thinking that precedes ar-
ticulation marks him as a metaphysician par excellence. Husserl
asserts that an idea can be possessed by a private, interior self,
and therefore that the self remains prior to language. The self
would then be prior, as well, to culture, history, tradition: a no-
tion that current theory finds, perhaps more than anything
else, anathema. Derrida is not a believer in culture in the cur-
rently fashionable sense; but he does insist that the self is sec-
ondary to, even reducible to, the series of signs generated in
time: that is, language. (The idea of a cryptic, hidden self de-
From Algeria to the École Normale 53