earlier work on Husserl. No longer would he make the bold
literary experimentalism of writers like Joyce and Mallarmé
yield priority to the staid Husserlian attitude to meaning, as
he did in his introduction to the “Origin of Geometry.” Der-
rida in his later work celebrates literary explosions of meaning,
at times preferring them to the firmer, if narrower, ground of
philosophy.
The antilogocentrism of experimental writing is impor-
tant to Derrida because it unmasks meaning as unstable, un-
reliable in its contingency. Such a vision of literature prevents
it from bearing much weight, whether cultural, historical, or
emotional. Instead, the object lesson of the avant-garde be-
comes a negative one, asserting the dominion of mere ran-
domness (though Derrida transforms this randomness into a
cataclysmic Nietzschean message in his 1966 essay “Structure,
Sign and Play,” which I discuss in the next chapter).
The confrontation between an inventive, potentially ex-
plosive approach to meaning and a careful, methodical one
marks Derrida’s struggle with Husserl’s work. The contest was
a close one, but the wild, centrifugal text (the kind that Der-
rida was about to produce) was bound to win out over the
more confined and predictable one (Husserl’s oeuvre). Beyond
mere skeptical assertion, Derrida now reaches toward the rad-
ical and the innovative, the world-changing. This prophetic at-
titude appears in many of Derrida’s texts from the late sixties
(often in conjunction with the name of Nietzsche, as in “Struc-
ture, Sign and Play” and “The Ends of Man”).
Speech and Phenomena,like its companion volumes Writ-
ing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology—both of them more
unbuttoned and extravagant in style than Derrida’s relatively
restrained study of Husserl—was published at a time when
France, like America, was breathing the atmosphere of a politi-
60 From Algeria to the École Normale