68 Jackie 1930–1962
proportion of his diplôme study from this work. He seems not to
have taken a liking to the Belgians he met. Luckily, he struck up a
friendship with Rudolf Boehm, a young German philosopher who
was collaborating on editing Husserl’s manuscripts. Every day, as
they walked through the town’s streets and parks, they held long
philosophical discussions together, on Husserl, of course, but also
on Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. As soon as he could, Derrida would
bring the conversation round to Heidegger, whose work was becom-
ing increasingly important to him – Boehm, a former student of
Hans-Georg Gadamer, had an excellent knowledge of it.^19
It was during this stay that Derrida discovered The Origin of
Geometry, one of Husserl’s late texts, which had only just been pub-
lished in Germany. It would hold a great importance for him over
the following years.^20 This did not, however, stop him feeling rather
glad to get back to Paris, with his thurne and his friends waiting for
him. Over the next few months, he worked intensely, writing a text
of some three hundred pages, on old bureaucratic forms and pieces
of headed notepaper for Mercier and Mumm champagne, piles of
which he had picked up at his father’s. Lucien Bianco would remem-
ber that Derrida sometimes read him passages of what he had just
written; but since he had never heard of Husserl before, he did not
understand much of it.
This is not the place to discuss such a technical work as The
Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy. But one of the most
striking things about what is presented as a mere dissertation is
Derrida’s self-confi dence. He goes through all of Husserl’s work and
is not afraid of questioning it. At the risk of committing an anachro-
nism, one might even say that he is starting to ‘deconstruct’ Husserl’s
work. At the end of the introduction, he does not hesitate to write:
In spite of the immense philosophical revolution that Husserl
undertook, he remains the prisoner of a great classical tradi-
tion: the one that reduces human fi nitude to an accident of
history, to an ‘essence of man’ that understands temporality
against the background of a possible or actual eternity in which
it has or could have participated. Discovering the a priori syn-
thesis of being and of time as foundation of any genesis and
every meaning, Husserl, to save the rigor and purity of ‘phe-
nomenological idealism’, did not open up the transcendental
reduction and did not adjust his method. To this extent, his
philosophy cries out to be overtaken in a way that will only be
a prolongation or, inversely, for a radical explicitation that will
be a veritable conversion.^21In spite of supervising the dissertation in a way described as
‘benevolent and vigilant’, the diplôme’s sole offi cial reader, Maurice