velops slowly in Derrida’s work, and is related to the impor-
tance of linguistic signs, since Derrida tends to identify the se-
cret self with opaque, fragmentary bits of language.)
Derrida, ascribing the metaphysical notion of the self to
Husserl, also charges him with a dangerous adherence to the
temporal present tense. Time, and what he claims to be Hus-
serl’s misunderstanding of it, will prove to be a crucial subject
for Derrida, as he offers his critique of Husserl’s effort to sep-
arate expression from indication in the Logical Investigations.
Now Derrida decisively turns toward a skeptical critique of
metaphysics, in the form of an attack on Husserl. The project
requires a distortion of Husserl’s view: a transformation of
him into a strident, defensive logocentrist.
Derrida paints Husserl as a thinker addicted to present-
ness as the necessary form of the availability of meaning. In
Speech and Phenomena,Derrida states that for Husserl “self-
presence must be produced in the undivided unity of a tem-
poral present so as to have nothing to reveal to itself by the
agency of signs” (Speech 60 ). This claim is inaccurate. As the
philosopher Natalie Alexander points out, Husserl is con-
cerned not with a punctual, self-sustaining present moment,
but rather with a “temporally extended whole,” in which a
now-phase is shadowed by what has just been and what is
about to come. Husserl does not claim that the now is a suffi-
cient, self-sustaining foundation. Instead, the now is depen-
dent on, and intertwined with, its past and its future.^13 For
Husserl every moment has a forward and backward horizon: it
implies past and future moments. This temporal span is re-
quired by our need for context. Every time we see something,
we are seeing as:seeing the thing as part of a larger whole. This
means that each perception must be prepared for by a sense of
how or why it occurs and what it might lead to. Husserl’s at-
54 From Algeria to the École Normale