turns Husserl into a representative of one-sided Neoplatonic
idealism, determined to float free of actual experience. But the
starting point of Husserlian phenomenology is exactly the op-
posite of what Derrida claims. Husserl returns to the things
themselves: how we perceive, imagine, think, and feel the
world. He wants to see what happens when we have an insight
or realize a truth.
In answer to the charge that Derrida betrays Husserl,
Derrida’s defenders might reply that this move is typical for a
philosopher: turning on his own ancestry, engaging in a
Bloomian misreading that enhances his own strength and de-
creases his precursor’s. Heidegger misread Nietzsche, Hegel
misread Kant, Nietzsche misread Plato...
This defense of Derrida has some validity. Heidegger, one
of Derrida’s crucial ancestors and his rhetorical model in many
ways, shared Derrida’s pious insistence that he was reading
earlier philosophers with rigor and responsibility: missing
nothing, with the sole aim of being true to the text. Yet Hei-
degger, just like Derrida, produced distorted, though bril-
liantly interesting, versions of Kant, Plato, and Nietzsche. He
saw in these earlier philosophers only what he wanted to see.
Derrida on Husserl emulates Heidegger in this enterprise
of revision—and, at times, falsification—of earlier philoso-
phers. But he goes further by suggesting, however fleetingly, his
antipathy to one of the basic motifs of philosophy, the search for
truth. Countering Husserl’s prizing of clarity and insight, Der-
rida in Speech and Phenomenatries to show that the insightful is
a subset of the non-insightful, never able to escape a tangled web
of glitches, nonsense, and semantic misfiring (Strategies 53 ). The
problem is that Derrida is then left unable to explain how
understanding, meaning, and truth actually occur.
Speech and Phenomenadiffers decisively from Derrida’s
From Algeria to the École Normale 59