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Husserl et al.

It was Husserl who taught me a technique, a method, a discipline, and who has never left me. Even in moments where I had to question certain presuppositions of Husserl, I tried to do so while keeping to phenomenological discipline.

– Sur parole

In everything I’ve published there are always touchstones announcing what I would like to write about later on – even ten or twenty years later on.

– I Have a Taste for the Secret

There will be established in Paris an École normale, where, from all the parts of the Republic, citizens already educated in the useful sciences shall be called upon to learn, from the best professors in all the disciplines, the art of teaching.

So read the 1794 decree that founded the École normale supérieure. Exclusive, often cultish, the ENS remains a breeding ground for France’s cultural elite, boasting thirteen Nobel Prizes (eight in physics), twelve Fields Medals for mathematics, and two Nobel Prizes in Literature – the awardees, Henri Bergson and the ubiquitous Sartre, taking their place at the ENS in a philosophical roll-call that includes Simone Weil, Raymond Aron, Jean Hyppolite, Étienne Balibar, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser. The latter two, like Derrida, ended up on the teaching staff. Sociologists Émile Durkheim and Pierre Bourdieu, the novelist and filmmaker Assia Djebar and the economist Thomas Piketty are among the ENS alumni, while Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan taught there, as did Jacques Lacan.

Despite its influence, or perhaps contributing to it, the student body was small. In the 1950s, when Jackie attended, he was one of only around 200 students, all men. He was one of only six philosophy students accepted that year, along with Michel Serres, later an ‘immortal’ at the Académie française.

Then as now, for the students, known as normaliens, there are no set classes, no programme of study, no reading list. Students study for four years, the third year being taken up with the agrégation for the civil service (normaliens are trainee civil servants) and the final year being spent on a dissertation. Classes are sought outside of the university, the results brought back. Adding to the sense of a cloistered existence was the fact that many members of the teaching staff were themselves ex-normaliens.

It was to one such student-turned-teacher that Jackie Derrida had to report on his first day: Louis Althusser, caïman of the university – the professor responsible for preparing students for the agrégation. Derrida later remembered

his face, Louis’s so very handsome face, that high forehead, his smile, everything that, in him, during the moments of peace – and there were moments of peace, as many of you here know – radiated kindness, the need for love and the giving of love in return, displaying an incomparable attentiveness to the youth of what is coming, curiously on the lookout from daybreak on for the signs of things still waiting to be understood, everything that upsets order, programs, facile connections, and predictability.¹

Twelve years older than Derrida, unknown and unpublished, the thirty-four-year-old Althusser was also born in Algeria, but to a prosperous Catholic family. His father had been a lieutenant in the French army and later the director of a bank, his mother a schoolteacher, and his childhood had been by his own admission a happy one. He was very much a petit-bourgeois product of French colonial culture. He was accepted into the ENS in July 1939. However, before the school year began, he was drafted into the army and, in June 1940, was captured at Vannes in northwestern France and sent to a POW camp in Schleswig-Holstein. Here he spent the remaining five years of the war, initially carrying out hard labour before an illness saw him confined to the infirmary.

The shattering experience of the war had two decisive effects on Althusser. The first, as alluded to by Derrida, was lifelong bouts of mental instability and depression. From the 1950s onwards he required constant medical supervision, undergoing hospitalisation, narcotherapy, electroconvulsive treatment and analysis. Once they became colleagues, Derrida was often required to take on some of Althusser’s teaching load when he was undergoing what Élisabeth Roudinesco has called ‘the saga of confinement.’²

The second was his introduction to Marxism. As documented in his prison writings, Journal de captivité, Stalag XA 1940–1945, the combination of a sense of solidarity, a sense of community and a sense of the urgency of political action opened this child of the bourgeoisie to the idea of communism. ‘It was in prison camp that I first heard Marxism discussed by a Parisian lawyer in transit and that I actually met a communist,’³ he wrote in his memoir, The Future Lasts a Long Time. Moreover, ‘Communism was in the air in 1945, after the German defeat, the victory at Stalingrad, and the hopes and lessons of the Resistance.’⁴ The future primary author of the ground-breaking Reading Capital spent the first few years after his internment doing just that.

Returning to the ENS in 1945, Althusser obtained his diploma for the paper ‘On Content in the Thought of G.W.F. Hegel’. Graduating in 1948 – first in his year – he was immediately offered the post at the university, a position that he held for thirty-five years. In the same year he joined the PCF, the French Communist Party, and attempted to synthesise his new worldview, Marxism, with his old, Catholicism, in articles with such exemplary titles as ‘Is the good news preached to the men today?’, which discussed the relationship between Catholicism and the labour movement.

If Althusser’s attempts at synthesis were very much the Geist of the times, the eventual choice of one faith over the other was inevitable. A 1949 papal decree excommunicated, en masse, all members of communist parties. In France, the left-wing journal Jeunesse de l’Eglise – ‘faithful to the Church while resisting’ – was censored and forced to close. Meanwhile communism in France, as elsewhere, was itself striving for a greater level of ideological purity. One could not back both horses.

Both of these two great messianic, teleological faiths were competing to explain the calamity of the Second World War and to point to a final transformation into an ideal society. The effects of their battle were felt throughout France, and the ENS found itself at the intellectual cutting edge. The student body divided itself into the Talas (the Catholics) and the Stals (the Stalinists), the latter, as Derrida later noted, dominating ‘in a very tyrannical manner’, which included forcing the entire school to observe a minute’s silence upon the death of Stalin.⁵

For young Jackie, pressured to join the Stals, the situation was complicated, politically, philosophically and temperamentally. The concerns of the Stals at the time were generally internationalist. The ‘overtheres’ of Hungary, Indochina, the Tito rebellion and such things were considered to represent parochial battles between Soviet and Western forms of not only politics but also philosophical and scientific knowledge. Worldviews were clashing, and they were fundamental to human subjectivity. To join the Party was to take a particular stance.

In addition, Algerian Jackie, without the buffer of wealth that the young Althusser had enjoyed, had seen at close hand the practicalities of a certain kind of class warfare. At seventeen he had ‘belonged to groups that took a stance … Without being for Algerian independence, we were against the harsh policies of France.’⁶

Notoriously, the PCF’s position on Algeria was for the colonisers and against the colonised. The attacks of 1 November 1954, Toussaint Rouge (Red All-Saints Day), generally regarded as the starting date of the Algerian War, were written off as acts of individual terrorism. And in March 1956 the Party voted with the government of Prime Minister Guy Mollet to impose special powers on the Algerian situation, in order not to ‘divide the republic’, a decision fellow traveller Sartre called ‘spineless’. While Jackie’s position was not pro-independence, to have followed the Party line on this would have been a betrayal of Algeria and his political instincts. ‘I was anti-Stalinist. I already had an image of the French Communist Party, and especially the Soviet Union, that seemed incompatible with, let’s say, the democratic Left to which I have always wished to remain loyal.’⁷

In part, one can also cite Derrida’s resistance to being affiliated to any sort of faction, his intense disinclination to have – as we saw in his response to his Jewish schooling – an identity imposed, with all of the approximations, lacunas and falsehoods that entails. But it goes deeper than that. Here, as during May 1968, Derrida’s temperamental resistance was of a piece with his, at this point, nascent philosophy. Crucial to his thinking, and indeed later his deconstruction, was a radical questioning of ‘the decision’ and the violence of any gesture that pretends (assumes, supposes, presupposes) to know, whether it be in politics, philosophy or language. Thus his engagement was of a piece with his engagement with Western metaphysics: to contextualise, to seek out hidden assumptions and to reveal the violence of any dichotomy.

At the time Jackie found himself ‘walled in by a sort of tormented silence’ in an institution where ‘there was, let’s say, a sort of theoretical intimidation: to formulate questions in a style that appeared, shall we say, phenomenological, transcendental or ontological was immediately considered suspicious, backward, idealistic, even reactionary.’⁸ Reflecting on Althusser’s decision to join the Party and his own decision not to, he argued:

each ‘subject’ (individual subject or subject trapped in a collective field) evaluates the best strategy possible from his place, from the ‘interpellation’ that situates him. For a thousand reasons that should be analyzed, my place was other. My personal history, my analytical abilities, etc. made it so that I could not be a Communist Party member… I had been plugged into another type of reading, questioning, and style that seemed to me just as necessary.⁹

And what was this reading, this questioning and style? As Derrida said in the same interview, it was to examine the work of the philosopher he found most important, Edmund Husserl.

Derrida’s taking up of Husserl was not absolutely philosophy ex nihilo at the ENS in the early 1950s. Sartre’s existentialism was on the wane. Where both Husserl and Heidegger had previously been read through the existentialist lens, they were now, as they were gradually translated into French, being read in the original and Sartre’s reading of Heidegger was more and more being regarded as a misreading. Heidegger’s thinking, however, was problematic. ‘Hitler’s philosopher’, as Althusser called him, was not popular with the Communists, although Derrida would later argue that his thought remained unavoidable and that ‘the avoidance of making any of this explicit annoyed me in a way, especially since Althusser was always fascinated with Husserl and Heidegger without his having ever given any public sign for this fascination.’¹⁰ Those who openly read Heidegger did so in what Derrida would refer to as an ‘occult atmosphere.’¹¹

Husserl, on the other hand, had no such associations. Moreover, his grounding in science, and his attempts to found a philosophical one, ran closer to the concerns of the normaliens than did the mysticism of Heidegger. As Derrida put it in 1980, ‘In the fifties … Husserlian phenomenology seemed to some young philosophers to be inescapable. I still see it today as a discipline of incomparable rigour.’ Jackie took to it wholesale, such that as early as 1954, Althusser was warning him not write so obsessively about his ‘master’. It was advice he did not take – his ‘master’ was to dominate his thinking for over a decade. Jackie’s dissertation for his diplôme d’etudes superieures (roughly equivalent to a master’s degree) tackled ‘The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy’, and is a wild, passionate piece of work, overflowing with ideas.

Husserl was born in Prostějov in 1859, the son of non-Orthodox Jews, and studied physics, mathematics and astronomy at the University of Leipzig. It is to the sciences that he remained devoted: ‘My mission,’ he wrote, ‘is science alone.’¹² After attaining his PhD in mathematics, in 1884 he attended the philosophy lectures of Franz Brentano (whose other students included Sigmund Freud and Rudolf Steiner). In 1887 he married Malvine Steinschneider, shortly after they had converted to Lutheranism.

Husserl’s initial goal and lifelong obsession was to find a way of grounding mathematics. How can we know that mathematics is true? His decision to dedicate himself to philosophy was a means to this end, and phenomenology an accident of his pursuit. As a system of epistemology – How do we know stuff? How do we know the stuff we know is right? – it was to grow into one of the major philosophical movements of the twentieth century, but Husserl never lost sight of the original stuff he wanted to know: mathematical truth and our justification for our confidence in it.

His first book, Philosophy of Arithmetic, was published in 1891. In it, Husserl attempted to secure a foundation for mathematics by examining the concept of number, in particular the concept of multiplicity. How do we have the concept of a multiplicity, say the number seven? Husserl argued that we do by reflecting on a set of objects, connected by the conjunction ‘and’. That is ‘one and one and one’, such that each object is identical with itself and different from the other objects. One then ‘abstracts’ a number from this multiplicity. This is a psychological answer – the work is done by the human mind.¹³

There are a number of objections to this. Where does one object end and another begin? How do we separate object x from the field of everything? And does our ability to make this judgement already rely on a concept of number (can I see seven things if I don’t already have the concept of seven)? Also how, if we obtain numbers from counting, do we explain 0 and 1? Husserl argued that we get to them by ‘taking away’, but as the mathematician Gottlob Frege was to argue in his review of the work, when I see ‘one moon’, it is implausible to assert I have carried out a subtraction from two.

Frege’s harsh review was of crucial importance to Husserl’s development. Husserl’s work, noted Frege, had a fundamental problem: psychologism. If numbers derive simply from a subject’s experience, numbers then become subjective. So how can objectivity be certain? Couldn’t the subject be wrong? Couldn’t we all be wrong? Far from being a foundation for mathematics, this leads to radical subjectivity; we need to be confident that 2 + 2 = 4 whether or not there is a human mind in which that concept adheres. Husserl’s book had thus failed in its mission. (In his dissertation, Jackie cheekily called it ‘the book of a disappointed mathematician’.)¹⁴

Husserl was himself becoming aware of these problems, as a letter to Frege makes clear. As he put it:

I was a novice, without a correct understanding of philosophical problems … And while laboring over projects concerning the logic of mathematical thought … I was tormented by those incredibly strange realms: the world of the purely logical and the world of actual consciousness – or, as I would say now, that of the phenomenological and also the psychological. I had no idea how to unite them; and yet they had to interrelate and form an intrinsic unity?¹⁵

Trying to unite these ‘incredibly strange realms’ constituted his life’s work, which he performed with varying degrees of success, always attempting to answer what was for him the fundamental question of how the mind can transcend its own experiences and gain a foothold in objectivity and what accounts for validity of knowledge. This began with his next work, The Logical Investigations, published in 1900–1. These investigations were, as he put it, ‘born of distress, of unspeakable mental distress, of a complete collapse’.¹⁶

Vast and unwieldy in its original form, with considerable slippage in the defining of its technical terms, it is for all that crucial in establishing Husserl’s ‘new science’, phenomenology. It is in this work, as Jackie writes in his dissertation, that ‘the phenomenological level is reached’, introducing its key concepts, including intentionality, the distinction between noema and noesis, the intuition of essences and mereology (the study of wholes and parts, a philosophical field of its own).

For Husserl, the first of these, intentionality, became the ‘indispensable fundamental concept of phenomenology’,¹⁷ and the key to any attempt to unite the incredibly strange realms. Descartes had argued cogito ergo sum, ‘I think therefore I am.’ But what is it to think? Consciousness does not simply ‘think’, it ‘thinks about’ – about trees, or what to have for lunch, or the problem of the concept of number. An ego alone in the universe, thinking, with no objects of consciousness, bears no relation to our own. In order to describe consciousness – and therefore do philosophy – one has to acknowledge and incorporate an ‘intentionality’, a directedness to our thinking.

By interrogating consciousness in this form – by describing how it is for consciousness to be in the world – we can attempt to establish and understand this concord between consciousness and the outer world. Husserl’s revolutionary insight is that this analysis does not require an investigation of one of the major questions that had dogged philosophy, overtly and covertly, since its inception: the question of the actual existence of the world. What is important is not, for instance, whether or not the tree I am experiencing actually exists, the important thing is my experience of it, as a first-person phenomenon. I am to describe this phenomenon and analyse it. This task of description and analysis is the task of phenomenology.

These ideas were elaborated on and interrogated further in the 1913 work, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, generally known as Ideas I. Husserl introduced the concept of the ‘epoché’, – from the ancient Greek, meaning ‘suspension of judgement’ or ‘withholding of assent’ – whereby the question whether the world exists is ‘bracketed’ out of the analysis. Whether there is a world or not is moot; consciousness is to be studied precisely as it is experienced, and objects are to be studied only as they are given to experience, as, therefore, phenomena:

Let us suppose that in a garden we regard with pleasure a blossoming apple tree, the freshly green grass of the lawn, etc. It is obvious that the perception and the accompanying liking are not, at the same time, what is perceived and liked. In the natural attitude, the apple tree is for us something existing in the transcendent realm of spatial actuality, and the perception, as well as the liking, is for us a psychical state belonging to real people. Between the one and the other real things, between the real person or the real perception, and the real apple tree, there exist real relations. In such situations characterizing mental processes, it may be in certain cases that perception is ‘mere hallucination’, the perceived, this apple tree before us, does not exist in ‘actual’ reality. Now the real relation, previously meant as actually existing, is destroyed. Only the perception remains, but there is nothing actual there to which it is related.¹⁸

This ‘bracketing’ was, importantly, not tactical; in no sense was Husserl simply putting the question to one side. On the contrary, he was attempting to access how the world actually is to consciousness in everyday life in the ‘natural attitude’. As in the above example, unless we make a conscious decision to question the existence of the apple tree (or the entire world) – when doing philosophy for instance, or as an intellectual game – we have an absolute confidence it is there, its existence is self-evident, to question it is unnatural. As he notes, in the epoché

the real world is not ‘re-interpreted’ or even denied, but an absurd interpretation of it, that is, an interpretation [such as philosophy] which contradicts the proper sense of reality as it is rendered self-evident, is removed. This interpretation is the product of a philosophical hypostatization of the world, which is completely alien to the natural view of the world.¹⁹

In other words, the world of human experience is the only world there is – ‘my world is the opening through which all experience occurs.’ In any situation into which we are thrown, we, as phenomenologists, must describe what it is like, and in absolute detail, using the ‘incomparable rigour’ to which Derrida alluded. Intentionality here becomes paramount, as the ‘existence of our consciousness is indubitably certain; existence of the natural world is phenomenal and doubtful; thus consciousness may exist without the material world, but the material world relies on consciousness.’²⁰

The world becomes an intentional correlate of consciousness. This means it is absurd to posit, as Kant did, a realm of ‘things in themselves’, somehow existing ‘behind’ what I perceive – a real apple tree behind the apple tree I perceive, inaccessible to me and all human perception, always and forever. In fact, the apple tree exists ‘for consciousness’ and ‘beyond that is nothing’.²¹

Husserl is thus trying to get to what he would term our pre-predicative (also called antepredicative) experience of the world. This is an originary moment where we are in the world, experiencing it before categories, before classifications, certainly before philosophical speculation. Hence his battle cry, ‘to the things themselves’, unmediated by conceptual baggage: immediate presence, timeless, uncontaminated by history.

Jackie spent the summer of 1953, back in El-Biar, immersed in a Paul Ricoeur translation of Ideas I. Then in January 1954 he was granted access to the Husserl Archives in Louvain, Belgium, where he studied Husserl’s vast corpus of unpublished manuscripts, smuggled out of Nazi Germany in 1938. This included more than 45,000 shorthand pages, his complete research library and 10,000 pages of typescripts. It was during this visit that Jackie encountered the short text The Origin of Geometry, the translation of which would be his first book.

The weeks that Jackie spent at the Husserl Archive deepened his fascination with the thinker. While he was glad to return to Paris, the trip had had a decisive effect, and he threw himself immediately into his dissertation, ‘The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy’, churning out in only a few months some 300 pages of dense, confident, interrogative prose.

In his introduction to the text, published thirty-seven years later, Derrida was astonished, as many other readers have been, to find that in style, voice and concerns, the mature thinker was more than recognisable in the twenty-four-year-old writing his first sustained work of philosophy. He noted ‘an originary complication of the origin… an initial contamination of the simple.’ The dissertation ‘even in its literal formation’ determined everything he had written since.²²

Jackie’s main concern in the dissertation is to do, as the title suggests, with the idea of ‘origin’. This is not ‘the beginning’ (although it is that too), but the moment of apprehension on which Husserl’s phenomenology depends. It is this moment of apprehension which phenomenology sets out to describe. To describe it, we must in some sense make time stand still. This is okay as a thought experiment. But time does not stand still. Every moment contains a temporal as well as a spatial thingness – a genesis. Suspend it if you like, but don’t then say that what you are presenting is a true description. Derrida’s dissertation essentially works through Husserl’s corpus identifying moments where it collapses under the weight of this tension between the spatial and the temporal.

Derrida’s insight was not completely original, although where he went with it was. In fact, it was a fellow alumnus of the ENS who had first identified a similar problem, the impossibility of a pre-conceptual originary moment, secured against time and history. Tran Duc Thao was born in French Indochina, in 1917. Studying under Maurice Merleau-Ponty at the ENS, he later became an anticolonialist, and was jailed in 1945 by the French government. In 1951, at the invitation of the new communist government, he returned to what was now Vietnam, becoming dean of History in the country’s first national university. By 1956 Thao had fallen out with the ruling party, criticising the land reforms that had led to large numbers of deaths. Forced to publish two self-criticisms in the official newspaper of the Party, he was stripped of his deanship. Spending the next thirty years in the provinces translating philosophy texts into Vietnamese, he eventually returned to France in the 1980s, dying in poverty in an apartment in the Vietnamese Embassy in 1993.

In 1951 he had published Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, a work of sustained brilliance which was hugely influential at the ENS – around half the papers that year which mentioned Husserl referenced Thao, ‘unheard of for the author of a secondary work.’²³ Thao regarded the Husserlian method as a decisive step in Western philosophy. However, as with Derrida, he was troubled by the pre-predicative state to which phenomenology appealed as the basis of its knowledge.

‘Phenomenology,’ he wrote, ‘wants to go back to the origin of the world, in order to account for all worldly knowledge in general.’²⁴ But there is a problem here. How, in what Thao refers to as the ‘rhapsody of sensations’, can we experience an ‘originary’ moment, and form, for instance, an apple tree? How can we take this undifferentiated unity and extract the apple tree, without already having a sense of this determination itself? Transcendental subjectivity presupposes the very thing it is supposed to produce. Or, as Thao put it:

It is all too clear that the genesis of antepredicative experience, the masterpiece of the Weltkonstitution [world constitution], was posited in reality on a ground incompatible with the philosophical framework on which it had been conceived.²⁵

Husserl had maintained that the reduction required a suspension of the normal belief in the world, and yet required that the essential component of the perceptual act is a conviction in the existence of objects and their transcendental constitution as objects. On top of this, Husserl was forced to argue for what he called ‘apperception’. If I see the front of an apple tree, I somehow intuit the rest of it. Again, I must already have the concept of the apple tree, or each new apple tree, otherwise it and any other object I encounter for the first time would be baffling in ways that new objects don’t tend to be in reality.

Derrida did not adopt all of Thao’s thinking – he felt that the second half of the book, which attempted to overcome the contradiction through dialectical materialism, was a ‘dead end’ – but he enthusiastically took up the question of pre-predicative experience, of origin and of the idea of genesis, with which Husserl himself had battled.

Derrida notes that it is much more difficult to identify, describe and analyse a particular moment in time than it is to do so with a particular point in space – standing in front of our apple tree for instance. It is a problem Husserl was aware of – in his 1907 lecture series, ‘The Idea of Phenomenology’, he noted that ‘as soon as we even make the attempt to undertake the analysis of pure subjective time-consciousness we are involved in the most extraordinary difficulties, contradictions and entanglements’.²⁶ These were difficulties which, at various times, Husserl grappled with, elided, glossed over and – as Derrida was to identify and deconstruct – unconsciously ignored.

In two of his most memorable phrases, Husserl described life in Ideas I as ‘the flowing thisness’, such that ‘incessantly the world of physical things, and, in it, our body, are perceptually there.’²⁷ All experience entails a temporal horizon, with time-consciousness at the basis of all intentional acts, as we experience all spatial acts, whether the object is stationary or not, as temporal, but not all temporal acts as spatial (speaking a sentence is an example of a temporal act that is not spatial). Time-consciousness is, as Husserl noted, the most ‘important and difficult of all phenomenological problems.’

Immersed in the flowing thisness, we stand again before our apple tree. If time-consciousness was merely succession, one thing constantly being replaced by another, we would never be able to create the tree out of our successive impressions, which we obviously do. Again, how? For Husserl the answer was as synthesis – we take these successive impressions and synthesise them into a unity:

Perception is a process of streaming from phase to phase; in its own way each of the phases is a perception, but these phases are continuously harmonized in the unity of a synthesis, in the unity of a consciousness of one and the same perceptual object that is constituted here originally. In each phase we have primordial impression, retention and protention … it is a unity of continual concordance.²⁸

Retention and protention are not, simply, memory and anticipation. They are structurally embedded in, and constituent of, any ‘present’. A now is ‘always essentially an edge-point in an interval of time’.²⁹ To use Husserl’s favoured example:

When, for example a melody sounds, the individual notes do not completely disappear when the stimulus or the action of the nerve excited by them comes to an end. When the new note sounds, the one just preceding it does not disappear without a trace; otherwise we should be incapable of observing the relations between the notes which follow one another … On the other hand, it is not merely a matter of presentations of the tones simply persisting in consciousness. Were they to remain unmodified, then instead of a melody we should have a chord of simultaneous notes or rather a disharmonious jumble of sounds.³⁰

A note in a melody is not heard in isolation, an originary point in the flux of time cannot, as Husserl hopes to argue, be pre-predicative. It always already requires categories and structures, in the same way that Thao had identified with concepts.

Husserl, notes Derrida, ‘takes the demand for absolute beginning and the temporality of the lived experience as the ultimate philosophical reference.’³¹ Genesis, which one might call the originary moment under the effects of time – each moment being a moment of ‘becoming’ – is problematic precisely as it occurs in time and thus requires the synthesis of protention and retention.

Jackie’s dissertation homed in on this contradiction – this aporia, a word he was to use for the first time in this work, and which remained a key to this thought. From the Greek a- (without) and poros (passage), the word appears frequently in Plato. In fact, one of the goals of Socrates’ dialogues is to force his interlocutor into an aporia by interrogating a concept (e.g. virtue) until the interlocutor is forced to admit he does not know its meaning. But where for Socrates the goal was to resolve the aporia in some sense, for Derrida, as we shall see, the goal was to keep an aporia in suspension, to, in Gabriel Marcus’s terms, prevent a mystery being reduced to a problem.

In a move worthy of his later deconstructive texts, Jackie notes that, despite constantly asserting that he wishes to analyse the pre-predicative temporal, and that he regards this as having primacy over the spatial, Husserl only ever uses spatial examples when carrying out his analyses. ‘In spite of frequent allusions at no time does time intervene in a decisive fashion.’³²

Examples of this spatial bias abound in Ideas I: ‘Lying in front of me is a piece of paper …’ (69); ‘Constantly seeing this table and meanwhile walking around it …’ (86); ‘we walk through the Gallery in Dresden …’ (250); ‘This is black, an inkpot, this black inkpot is not white is, if white, not black …’; and even in the realm of the imaginary, ‘Let us generate optional intuitions in phantasy of physical things, such as free intuitions of winged horses, white ravens, golden mountains and the like…’ (356). Again and again Husserl, notes Derrida, ‘stops at becoming, turning it into eidos’.³³ Where Husserl had written, in his 1905 The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, ‘Naturally we all know what time is; it is that which is most familiar,’ it had revealed itself as that which, if familiar, remained most uncanny, and which threw doubt on his whole philosophical project. As Jackie noted, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness was never finished, never published as a completed work. The subject had proved too difficult.

There exists only one piece of footage of Husserl. Shot by James L. Adams when the philosopher was seventy-seven years old, two years before he died in 1938, it shows Husserl with his wife, Malvine, walking in an unidentified garden in summer. Husserl performs for the camera the part of the peripatetic philosopher. Suited, wearing sunglasses, he carries in his left hand his hat, and gestures emphatically with his right, to a nodding Malvine. Twice the camera zooms in to show him from the waist up; he stops speaking and returns the gaze of the camera as one would if being photographed. He stops talking, blinks at the camera, resumes. His image slides and wobbles, extends and shrinks back, as if viewed through bent plastic. It is pixelated into large square blocks; we are seeing and not seeing Husserl. The camera draws back and Malvine performs asking a question, to which Husserl performs replying. The footage ends with another closeup, or perhaps this is the same one.

At the time he was captured on film in the sunny garden Husserl was working on his last great work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, which would remain unfinished. He was writing it in the shadow of catastrophe. In 1936 Europe was sick, as Husserl wrote in his Vienna lecture, ‘The Crisis of European Humanity’, and the human sciences were incapable of effecting a cure.

Three years earlier, in April 1933, he had been first suspended from his professorship at Freiburg University for being a Jew, despite that fact that both he and Malvine had converted to Lutheranism almost fifty years earlier. Both their sons had served in the German army in the First World War – the younger one losing his life – and his daughter had served as a field nurse. Two weeks later he had all his academic privileges terminated in accordance with the National Reich law of April 28, relegated, as he put it, to ‘the non-Aryan dung heap’.³⁴

Between these two events, on 21 April, his former student Martin Heidegger, who had dedicated his Being and Time to Husserl, had been appointed as rector of the University. In May, shortly after joining the Nazi Party, Heidegger gave his notorious rectorship address, ‘The Self-Assertion of the German University’, in which he – partially or fully, consciously or unconsciously, tactically or venally, the debate rages on – aligned the goals of the university, its ‘historical mission’ no less, with those of the Third Reich. Heidegger remained a member of the Nazi Party until the end of the Second World War.

Supporters of Heidegger have sometimes parsed his actions to the point where black is white, and where his extolling of the Führer Principle is ‘an occurrence of unveiling, a fate-laden happening upon thought’.³⁵ They have pointed out, for instance, that the decision to suspend Husserl was taken by Heidegger’s predecessor, and that the decision to terminate his academic privileges was simply the law. But Husserl himself was less sanguine. In a letter to another former student, Dietrich Mahnke, he wrote:

The perfect conclusion to this supposed bosom friendship of two philosophers was his very public, very theatrical entrance into the Nazi Party on May 1. Prior to that there was his self-initiated break in relations with me – in fact, soon after his appointment at Freiburg – and, over the last few years, his anti-Semitism, which he came to express with increasing vigor – even against the coterie of his most enthusiastic students, as well as around the department.³⁶

This, he believed, was simply part of a wider cataclysm, which philosophy seemed incapable of explaining or preventing. For Husserl, this slide into barbarity, which had seen him lose most of his German students and in 1937 saw him lose his house, was intertwined with the deeply melancholy realisation that ‘philosophy as a science, as a serious, rigorous, indeed apodictically rigorous science – the dream is over.’³⁷

In The Crisis Husserl grapples with intersubjectivity and what he would call ‘the life-world’ – the ‘coherent universe of existing objects … valid for our consciousness as existing precisely through living together’ – which he recognised complicated his phenomenological project. But Husserl grappling with complications is, in a sense, Husserl par excellence. Few thinkers in the history of philosophy have tussled so unremittingly with their own ideas as he did, each book taking on the last, refining it, refuting it – one might cheekily say, deconstructing it. And in 1936, for Husserl the philosopher the difficulty had become, as it had become for Husserl the man, history and other people. How was one to find, in all this time and all these other beings – a point of origin from which to describe being?

Time – and history – which he hoped to hold at bay, kept asserting themselves, as problems that could not be bracketed off. Derrida’s dissertation concludes, melodramatically but effectively, with Husserl’s words to his sister during his final illness.

Just when I am getting to the end and when everything is finished for me, I know that I must start everything again from the beginning.³⁸

On reading the published edition of The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy in 1990, the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy wrote to Derrida that the incredible thing about the work was that ‘you can’t find the young Derrida in it … the genesis of Derrida, yes, but not the young Derrida. He’s already completely there, fully armed and helmeted like Athena.’³⁹ This was not simply a question of style, voice and concerns. In the dissertation we see, in utero, concepts that would remain central to Derrida’s thought – the aporia, the decision, undecidability and, in that suspension of judgement, that retaining of a contradiction without privileging one term or the other, the idea he would come to call différance. And in its method – analysing the originary moment as it appeared in Husserl’s work, book by book – it met the criteria he set for deconstruction in a lecture at Oxford thirty years later, ‘a genealogical analysis of the trajectory through which the concept has been built, used, legitimized.’⁴⁰

When Derrida submitted it, Althusser said, ‘I can’t grade this, it’s too difficult, too obscure …’⁴¹ He decided to pass it on to a friend, an assistant professor at Lille who occasionally lectured at the ENS – Michel Foucault. Derrida had previously attended some of these lectures by this ‘charismatic’ young man, only four years older than himself. These included taking the students to a psychiatric hospital to watch patients being examined. He found it ‘really upsetting’.⁴² After reading the dissertation Foucault said to him, ‘Well, it’s either an F or an A+.’

For all his brilliance, Derrida continued to struggle at the ENS. In part the problem was his Husserl obsession, and, more crucially, the strain of creating the voice and the concepts that later both exhilarated and frustrated readers within academia and beyond. Althusser, marking one essay, noted that his work would only meet the approval of examiners ‘if you perform a radical overhaul, in the exposition and the expression. Your current difficulties are the price you’re paying for a year devoted to reading and thinking about Husserl, who as I have to tell you again, isn’t a familiar thinker for the jury.’⁴³

His problems at the ENS also arose from the same anxiety that had plagued him at the lycée. Again he resorted to amphetamines, again he fled part of the written exams, again he finished last in the orals. Failure at the agrégation was not unheard of – Sartre had likewise failed. But Derrida’s failure condemned him to another year of work at the ENS. In the end, he passed, with results that were mediocre compared to his abilities. Althusser wrote to congratulate him, noting that ‘quite simply your friendship has been for me one of the most fine and valuable things about these last two years at the Ecole.’⁴⁴

If the seeds of deconstruction were present in 1954, it would be another ten years before they bore any sort of fruit. Before they did, Derrida had to look outwards, to move from an analysis of a single subject to the analysis of an intersubjective community. He would have to examine language and writing, and, like Husserl, the problem of the other.