mains “self-effacing before the originality and primordiality of
meanings” (Writing 155 ). We all perceive, we all think: Husserl
attends to these basic facts. He is faithful to experience and op-
posed to any tendency on the part of philosophy to impose its
will on the world. (In this respect, Husserl differs starkly from
Hegel.)
Derrida goes on to argue that Husserl’s ideal fidelity to
phenomena takes two divergent forms. On the one hand,
Husserl aims for a descriptive clarity concerning the structure
of experience (how perception or imagination work, for ex-
ample). On the other, he tries to uncover origin rather than
structure: the historical roots of the way we see and know the
world. Notably, Husserl attempts this understanding of the
genesis of our experience in “The Origin of Geometry” ( 1936 ),
which Derrida studied so intensively in the late fifties and the
beginning of the sixties.
Husserl refuses to believe that numbers or geometrical
shapes simply “fell from heaven.” Instead, they were invented,
or discovered, by particular people, who then transmitted
their discovery to others. Here, though, Husserl runs into what
Derrida calls the difficulty of “accounting for a structure of
ideal meaning on the basis of a factual genesis” (Writing 158 ).
Derrida suggests that genesis and structure—that is, the birth
of geometry and its systematic nature—cannot be coherently
related, despite Husserl’s wishes. Yet these two aspects are,
nonetheless, conjoined in some way.
Ideal geometrical shapes somehow came out of pre-
geometrical experience. But how? It could not be the case that
evidence for geometry accumulated in someone’s mind, lead-
ing to an inevitable conclusion that such ideal forms must
exist. Instead, this was a true intellectual revolution: a world-
historical stroke of imaginative transformation, whose author
and motive remain unknown to us.
42 From Algeria to the École Normale