Derrida

Deconstruction from Phenomenology to Ethics

Christina Howells

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745611686, 9780745611679
• eBook ISBN: 9780745667270
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book is an unusually readable and lucid account of the development of Derrida's work, from his early writings on phenomenology and structuralism to his most recent interventions in debates on psychoanalysis, ethics and politics.

Christina Howells gives a clear explanation of many of the key terms of deconstruction - including différance, trace, supplement and logocentrism - and shows how they function in Derrida's writing. She explores his critique of the notion of self-presence through his engagement with Husserl, and his critique of humanist conceptions of the subject through an account of his ambivalent and evolving relationship to the philosophy of Sartre. The question of the relationship between philosophy and literature is examined through an analysis of the texts of the 1970s, and in particular Glas, where Derrida confronts Hegel's totalizing dialectics with the fragmentary and iconoclastic writings of Jean Genet.

The author addresses directly the vexed questions of the extreme difficulty of Derrida's own writing and of the passionate hostility it arouses in philosophers as diverse as Searle and Habermas. She argues that deconstruction is a vital stimulus to vigilance in both the ethical and political spheres, contributing significantly to debate on issues such as democracy, the legacy of Marxism, responsibility, and the relationship between law and justice.

Comprehensive, cogently argued and up to date, this book will be an invaluable text for students and scholars alike.

1

Phenomenology

As the twentieth century draws to its close, phenomenology is largely out of fashion in France, having been replaced by intellectual movements such as existentialism, structuralism, postmodernism and post-structuralism in increasingly rapid succession. But in the opening years of the century, and indeed up until the 1960s, phenomenology was a force to be reckoned with, and was the first sparring partner of many of the major exponents of those later philosophical movements just evoked. Sartre, Levinas, Lyotard and Derrida himself all started their publishing careers with a critique/ exposition of a certain aspect of phenomenology. Their works cannot be properly understood without some knowledge of what they are criticizing or refining. This chapter will attempt to elucidate the phenomenological enterprise itself and Derrida’s own engagement with it. It will necessarily be somewhat technical: phenomenology had radical ambitions, it set out to revolutionize epistemology, psychology and ultimately science, and its terminology may present some difficulties to those unfamiliar with it.

Phenomenology is a philosophy of consciousness which attempts to avoid the reefs of dualistic views such as empiricism and idealism by putting aside all preconceptions about the relationship between mind and world. It sets out to rethink the fundamental distinction between subject and object, and to go beyond naturalist epistemology to describe afresh how consciousness relates to the world of phenomena. Consciousness, according to phenomenology, is always directed outside itself to the world, and this relationship is referred to as one of ‘intentionality’. Husserl, the major founder of phenomenology, described it as ‘the true positivism’ (ED, 229), aiming to return ‘to things themselves’ (‘zu den Sachen selbst’). Its specificity lies not so much in its object – after all, as Husserl commented, other sciences also treat of ‘phenomena’, be they psychological, scientific, cultural or historical (Ideas, 42) – as in its method. Phenomenology entails ‘a new way of looking at things … one that contrasts at every point with the natural attitude of experience and thought’ (p. 43). This method is that of ‘phenomenological reduction’, a set of procedures which involve purifying the natural outlook of the contingencies of psychology and empiricism. To use its own terminology, phenomenology aims to describe transcendental consciousness through an intuition of essences. More simply, phenomenology describes consciousness stripped of its personal, empirical irrelevancies. Its object is transcendental in so far as it is not identified with any particular individual. Phenomenological reduction, also known as the epoche, puts aside, or ‘brackets off’ the contingent and personal to reveal the underlying universal structures of, for example, imagination or perception. It abandons the ‘natural attitude’ in an effort to describe, without preconception, what appears to consciousness, that is, phenomena as they are ‘intended’ by consciousness. But this is, as we shall see, easier said than done.

Derrida studied phenomenology in Paris with Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur. He considers Husserl to have been one of the major influences on his philosophical formation, along with Heidegger and Hegel. Indeed, Derrida’s whole philosophical programme seems to spring from his tussle with phenomenology. It is the phenomenological attempt to ground knowledge in experience, evidence and self-presence, and its apparent failure, that leads him to the conclusion that the attempt itself is fundamentally misconceived. Phenomenology does not fail, as Husserl believed, because it is still only in its infancy and success has so far eluded it, but because it is engaged in a project based on false, though ineluctably seductive, premises. As Derrida explains in an interview published in 1984, ‘I never shared Husserl’s pathos for, and commitment to, a phenomenology of presence. In fact, it was Husserl’s method that helped me to suspect the very notion of presence and the fundamental role it played in all philosophies.’¹ This is, of course, a retrospective interpretation of his own attitude to Husserl, and by examining the three major texts Derrida devotes to the phenomenologist we will be able to assess the development of ‘suspicion’ as a dominant feature in his analyses.

Derrida’s first and second published books both deal with Husserl: he translates and introduces The Origin of Geometry in 1962, producing a 170-page Introduction to a work of forty pages; and in 1967 La Voix et le phénomène is subtitled Introduction au problème du signe dans la phénoménologie de Husserl. Earlier still, as a research student in 1954, Derrida devoted his MA dissertation to Le Problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl (not published until 1990). Derrida’s first published paper on Husserl, ‘ “Genèse et structure” et la phénoménologie’,² was delivered at the invitation of Maurice de Gandillac at a conference in Cerisy la Salle in 1959 dedicated to Genesis and Structure. It opens with a warning: the attempt to apply the polarized concepts of ‘genesis’ and ‘structure’ to Husserl’s work involves doing violence to the nature of his thought. The use of antagonistic and antithetical terms is out of keeping with Husserl’s own dislike of debate, aporias and dilemmas. Husserl shunned efforts to find decisive solutions to philosophical questions, and associated such attempts with the ‘speculative’ or dialectical method which he rejected. In Husserl’s view, both metaphysicians and empiricists are guilty of similar oversimplifications. However, Derrida accepts the challenge of the conference topic, and agrees to engage in what he describes as an ‘aggression’ and an ‘infidelity’ towards Husserl (ED, 228). Husserl himself, argues Derrida, would have rejected the opposition between genesis and structure as false: some areas of investigation invite a structural approach, some a genetic one; some layers of meaning appear in the form of systems and static configurations, others reveal their origins and development and demand a genetic interpretation. Husserl’s objective is faithful description rather than rigid categorization. Derrida demonstrates how consistent Husserl is in this respect, combining and moving between analyses of genetic constitution and descriptions of formal, static structures in works as diverse as Philosophie der Arithmetik (1891), Logical Investigations (1900–1), and Ideas (1913). Indeed, Husserl’s analyses frequently pass from an account of structures precisely to an investigation of the production of those structures, which in turn leads to a further exploration of the forms (what Husserl refers to as the ‘structural a prioris’) of that very genesis. Husserl, then, is ‘serene’ in his unified conception of the phenomenological endeavour (ED, 232).

Derrida, however, is less convinced. The tensions implicit in a mode of thinking that is simultaneously an exploration of intangible, a priori essences and a philosophy of experience, becoming and temporal flux cannot be so easily overcome. Derrida envisages two main problematic areas. Firstly, he considers that an unfinished debate underlies the apparent ‘serenity’ of all the major phases of phenomenological reduction, with the consequence that there is an indefinite need for a further reduction, however far the process has gone already. Secondly, this same debate appears to imperil the very principles of the phenomenological method, and to compel Husserl to transgress the supposedly descriptive nature of his work and its transcendental aims, and to enter into the metaphysics of history, the teleology of which becomes increasingly incompatible with a priorism or transcendental idealism.

In fact, Derrida maintains, it was an initial failure to reconcile the demands of structure with those of genesis that founded the phenomenological project. Husserl’s investigations began with his Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891), intended to lay the foundations of a philosophy of mathematics, in which he analyses the concept of number from both a logical and a psychological point of view, relating the objectivity of arithmetical series and numbers to their concrete genesis. In the first place, he refuses to envisage the ‘universal structure’ of numbers as an eternal truth produced by an infinite reason. On the contrary, he insists on seeking its roots in subjectivity and acts of perception, and thereby lays himself open to accusations of ‘psychologism’, though he never falls into the trap of confusing factual constitution with epistemological validation. Indeed, Husserl’s respect for what Derrida calls the ‘ideal’ and ‘normative’ nature of ‘arithmetical meaning’ (ED, 234) ultimately prevents him from espousing a psychological theory of the origin of arithmetic and forces him to accept Frege’s criticism: the essence of number is no more dependent on consciousness than the existence of the North Sea. Logicism (the theory that all mathematics can be deduced from logic), however, is equally insufficient as an explanatory system: Husserl is determined to maintain simultaneously the autonomy of logic or mathematics with respect to individual consciousnesses and their originary dependence on subjectivity in general. It is this need for a concrete, but non-empirical, transcendental form of intentional consciousness that leads Husserl to his series of ‘reductions’. His search for a common root for the objective structures of mathematics involves the wholesale rejection of causalism, naturalism and historicism, but not (in the long term) the abandonment of genetic description. Nor will Husserl consent to solve the problems he encounters by simply distinguishing between the natural and the human sciences: this very distinction begs all the questions it sets out to resolve.

Interestingly, Derrida points out, phenomenology and structuralism are born almost simultaneously: at the same time as Husserl is developing his earliest phenomenological theories, the first structuralist projects are being produced. And what is even more intriguing is that Husserl’s objections to these – as they are exemplified by Gestalt³ psychology and by Dilthey’s critique of historical reason – are identical with his objections to geneticism. In his view, Dilthey’s hermeneutic structuralism is historicist and, despite Dilthey’s protests, relativist and sceptical (ED, 237). Husserl is positive about Dilthey’s notion of compréhension (verstehen),⁴ about his conception of unified, totalized structures, and about the distinction he draws between physical and mental structures, but he believes that these modifications are not radical, and in fact increase the threat of historicism by making it more seductive. History does not stop being an empirical science simply by reforming its methods.

In reaction, Derrida surmises, against historicist and psychologist forms of geneticism, the first phase of Husserl’s elaboration of the phenomenological method entails a radical rejection of all geneticism and is resolutely static and structuralist. At this stage, Husserl distinguishes between empirical and eidetic or transcendental structures, but has not yet made a similar distinction regarding genesis. Derrida here engages directly with the very specialized argumentation of phenomenology in terms of noetico-noematic structures on the one hand and morphe-hyletic structures on the other (very broadly speaking, form and matter, but I do not propose to enter into these complex, technical issues) and argues that matter itself, for Husserl, necessarily implies temporality. The implications of this are immense: if the hyle (matter) is intrinsically temporal, then Husserl’s attempt to eschew geneticism is undermined from within. If the transcendental structure of consciousness necessitates a passage to its genetic constitution, then Husserl’s determination to remain in the domain of pure structure has brought about its own downfall. As Derrida will argue time and again, the basic premises of phenomenology, that is to say, originary evidence and the unmediated presence of the thing itself to consciousness, are radically put in question by the logic of phenomenology itself (ED, 244).

These problems arise from the attempt to determine the ‘objectivity’ of the object. A similar set of problems is attached to phenomenological psychology: if structuralist psychology claims to be independent of transcendental phenomenology, can it escape accusations of psychologism? Husserl himself recommended the establishment of a phenomenological psychology in parallel to transcendental phenomenology. However, the notion of a parallel implies the impossibility of moving from one plane to the other, and Husserl’s criticisms of Gestalt psychology concern precisely its attempt to make such a move. In a sense, psychology and transcendental phenomenology are separated by nothing, but, like a good negative theologian, Derrida claims that it is this very ‘nothing’ that makes the transcendental reduction possible (ED, 246. See also VP, 12).

Derrida concludes his essay on ‘Genèse et structure’ with a brief examination of some of the later concerns of genetic phenomenology. He describes it as diffracted, after Ideas 1, in three different directions: firstly, towards the domain of logic, in which the ‘reduction’ is applied not merely to scientific idealizations but also to those of cultural life and lived experience. Secondly, towards a description of the ego: Husserl recognized explicitly that his accounts of the relationship between consciousness and its objects presupposed an ego whose constitution he should in due course account for (ED, 247. See the Cartesian Meditations). And thirdly, in the direction of history and teleology: indeed, history and teleology are not separable for Husserl, since he describes the eidos or essence of historicity as its telos. What is more, Derrida argues, the eidos of history is for Husserl not merely one essence amongst others, it implies the whole of existing beings in so far as these are part of human, animal or natural life. Here, Derrida suggests, Husserl has surely gone beyond phenomenological description into the domain of metaphysics. Reason, Husserl maintains, is the Logos as it is produced in history. It is speech as auto-affection, self-presence mediated through language only to return once more to its original self-identity. The deconstruction of this position is one of Derrida’s major concerns in La Voix et le phénomène. The Origin of Geometry describes the exposition of reason in the world as both indispensable to the constitution of truth yet threatened by the exteriority of the sign. This text was to be the subject of Derrida’s first book and we shall examine it shortly.

Phenomenology, then, in Derrida’s first account of it, is both a critique of metaphysics and also a participant in the metaphysical enterprise. It cannot avoid entrapment in the system it is setting out to criticize.⁵ Husserl himself recognizes and indeed asserts this relationship in his Cartesian Meditations when he claims that phenomenology is indeed metaphysical in so far as the term implies the deepest knowledge of being. He envisages phenomenology as the final phase in a process that has led from pre-theoretical culture through philosophy to the phenomenological project itself. And it is this project that finally reconciles structure and genesis in so far as it may be described structurally as genesis itself. These descriptions, Derrida maintains, have depended on a series of fundamental distinctions between different kinds of genesis (worldly and transcendental) and different kinds of structure (empirical, eidetic and transcendental). Ultimately, it makes no sense to ask what the notions of structure and genesis in general mean, or even mean for Husserl. Husserl himself did not overlook or neglect these general questions; rather he recognized that answering them would involve moving into a domain prior to the transcendental reduction itself. And this domain would be that of the very possibility of questioning, of interrogation itself. It would be the domain therefore of meaninglessness and death, and as such prior to philosophical investigation.⁶

Derrida’s first account, then, takes phenomenology on its own terms, at the same time as teasing out the contradictions and tensions which are implicit in the project and which Husserl himself believed to be symptoms of its immaturity rather than aporias lying at its very heart. Derrida does not declare himself on the vexed question of genesis versus structure, but reveals the disturbing paradoxes raised both by an attempt to reconcile them and by an attempt to opt for one at the expense of the other. For the moment genesis and structure appear in an uneasy and unstable symbiosis.

Derrida’s translation and Introduction to The Origin of Geometry was published in 1962, thre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Key Contemporary Thinkers
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Apologia
• 1 Phenomenology
• 2 Structuralism
• 3 Language: Speech and Writing
• 4 Deconstructing the Text: Literature and Philosophy
• 5 Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis
• 6 The Ethics and Politics of Deconstruction and the Deconstruction of Ethics and Politics
• Bibliography
• Index