that “there is an unfailing complicity between idealization and
speech” in Husserl (Speech 75 ); but Husserl simply does not
emphasize speech, or connect it to idealizing. Derrida asserts
that Husserl names “the voice that keeps silence” ( 70 ) as the
basis for meaning. This is Derrida’s image, and Derrida’s idea—
not Husserl’s.
One might be reminded of a comment by Paul de Man,
who charged that Derrida in his Grammatology“deliberately
misreads Rousseau for the sake of his own exposition and
rhetoric” (Blindness 139 ). Derrida performs the same kind of
misreading of Husserl in Speech and Phenomena.The Husserl
scholar Claude Evans even suggested, with tongue in cheek,
thatSpeech and Phenomenamight be a satire, given the bizarre
picture of Husserl it delivers to its readers (Strategies 172 ).
Evans, as he knew, went too far. Derrida is surely serious
in his treatment of Husserl. But just as surely he reduces
Husserl to a much lesser thinker than he is. In Derrida’s hands,
Husserl becomes a rather simplistic exponent of “being as
presence,” determined to exile everything contingent and
worldly. The strange combination of contingent origin (Greece)
and absolute truth (geometry) that intrigued Derrida when he
commented on Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry” has been elim-
inated. Now, five years later, Derrida charges that Husserl
wants to expel all contingency.
Derrida’s Husserl wishes to escape death and flee into the
fantasyland of transcendental thought, free of space and time.
According to Derrida, Husserl promises that “I can empty all
empirical content, imagine an absolute overthrow of the con-
tent of every possible experience, a radical transformation of
the world. I have a strange and unique certitude that this uni-
versal form of presence, since it concerns no determined
being, will not be affected by it” (Speech 54 ). In effect, Derrida
58 From Algeria to the École Normale