analysis, on which a study of Freud’s personality sheds much
light.)
The introduction contains a startling digression on, of all
figures, James Joyce. In the midst of his knotty reflection on
Husserl’s idea of meaning, Derrida suddenly juxtaposes Hus-
serl’s attitude toward meaning with Joyce’s. Joyce, he writes,
“take[s] responsibility for all equivocation.” The Irish writer
sees “the greatest potential for buried, accumulated, and inter-
woven intentions within each linguistic atom, each vocable,
each word, each simple proposition, in all worldly cultures and
their most ingenious forms (mythology, religion, science, arts,
literature, politics, philosophy, and so forth).” Joyce, Derrida
concludes, sets as his aim “to travel through and explore the
vastest possible historical distance that is now at all possible”
(Introduction 102 ). Husserl, by contrast, attempts “to reach
back and grasp again at its pure source a historicity or tradi-
tionality that no de facto historical totality will yield of itself.
This historicity or traditionality is always already presupposed
by every Odyssean repetition of Joyce’s type” ( 103 ). Joyce may
know history, but Husserl, more profoundly, wants to under-
stand where history comes from.
The invoking of Joyce was an omen. Derrida was already,
in the mid-sixties, on his way to becoming the most literature
obsessed of philosophers. But far from turning philosophy
into a kind of literature, Derrida in his pairing of Joyce and
Husserl implies that Joyce’s wild, word-spinning freedom de-
pends upon a “historicity or traditionality” that Husserl can
grasp as Joyce cannot, because Husserl goes to the source,
meaning’s origin. In this way, Derrida remains loyal to Husserl
and to philosophy. He suggests that philosophy has an under-
standing of origins, and an explanatory prestige, that literature
From Algeria to the École Normale 47