Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology

by Leonard Lawlor

What is the nature of the relationship of Jacques Derrida and deconstruction to Edmund Husserl and phenomenology? Is deconstruction a radical departure from phenomenology or does it trace its origins to the phenomenological project? In Derrida and Husserl, Leonard Lawlor illuminates Husserl’s influence on the French philosophical tradition that inspired Derrida’s thought. Beginning with Eugen Fink’s pivotal essay on Husserl’s philosophy, Lawlor carefully reconstructs the conceptual context in which Derrida developed his interpretation of Husserl. Lawlor’s investigations of the work of Jean Cavaillès, Tran-Duc-Thao, and Jean Hyppolite, as well as recent texts by Derrida, reveal the depth of Derrida’s relationship to Husserl’s phenomenology. Along the way, Lawlor revisits and sheds light on the origin of many important Derridean concepts, such as deconstruction, the metaphysics of presence, différance, intentionality, the trace, and spectrality.

Genres: Philosophy

280 pages, Paperback

First published March 19, 2002

About the author

Leonard "Len" Lawlor is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Continental philosophy. He is author of Imagination and Chance: The Difference between the Thought of Ricoeur and Derrida and co-editor (with Fred Evans) of Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty's Notion of the Flesh. He is a founding editor of the journal Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning the Thought of Merleau-Ponty.

Reviews

[C. Quabela · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read a good deal of Derrida without ever really grasping the implications. This work, focusing on Derrida’s relation to Husserl’s phenomenology, although not resulting in a total breakthrough of insight for me, has offered me a much deeper understanding of deconstruction than I had before. With so much focus on language in his later works we loose sight of the fact that he is working off a tradition that was intimately related with space and time. These two factors, which draw in other thinkers such as Levinas, Heidegger, and Nietzsche, to name a few, make Derrida’s thought much less esoteric. What was the most helpful was the putting of Derrida’s differance in Heideggerian terms through Levnias’ counterposition between ontology and metaphysics. Derrida is meta-metaphysical because he seeks the phenomenological point that opens up the possibility of phenomenology in the first place. It is a genetic question and therefore non-philosophical in that it precedes philosophy’s possibility. The part on Husserl’s relation to Levinas in regard to transcendental symmetry blew open my understanding of Derrida’s irreducible violence.

Of utmost interest to me is the development of the notion of genesis in contrast to eschatology. I have always had a deep aversion to any form of telos and, although I don’t yet completely grasp the full structure and implication of Derrida’s ethics/politics, this book has definitely reframed the more esoteric concepts like ghost, gift, specter, and faith in much more familiar relations such as alterity, dialectic, and eternal recurrence, in such a way that I feel will set me up for future comprehensions.

[André Sette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fundamental para entender o verdadeiro Jacques Derrida