Husserl, Freud, A Suivre: Derrida on Time

References

• Jacques Derrida: The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1978), translated by Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 285 (English trans. modified), hereafter cited as PC.
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• Jacques Derrida: “Living on: borderlines” in Harold Bloom et al. Deconstruction & Criticism, New York: Continuum, 1979, pp. 75–176, also in Jacques Derrida: Parages Paris: Galilée, 1986.
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• Jacques Derrida: Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (1998), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg. This also contains the text of Blanchot's récit: L'instant de ma mort, originally published by Fata Morgana, Paris 1994, pp. 2–11.
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• Jacques Derrida: Archive-Fever; A Freudian Impression (1995), translated by Eric Prenowitz, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, hereafter cited as AF; Jacques Derrida: Resistances of Psychoanalysis (1996), translated by Peggy Kamuf, Pascale Anne Brault, and Michael Naas, Stanford University Press, Stanford: 1998, and Jacques Derrida; Aporias: Dying/Awaiting (one another) at the limits of truth (1993), translated by Thomas Dutoit, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993, hereafter cited as ADA.
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• Jacques Derrida: Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, translated by David Allison, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1978, hereafter cited as SP. In his book, Derrida and Husserl; the Basic Problem of Phenomenology, Indiana IN: Indiana University Press, 2002, Len Lawlor suggests the necessity of retranslating this title as Voice and Phenomenon, with which I here concur.
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• Jacques Derrida: Edmund Husserl's ‘Origin of Geometry’; An Introduction by Jacques Derrida (1962), hereafter cited as IOG, translated with an introduction by John P. Leavey, Lincoln, NA: University of Nebraska Press, 1989 and Jacques Derrida: The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy (1990), translated by Marian Hobson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, hereafter cited as POG. For a detailed and critical reading of the former see Burt Hopkins; ‘Husserl and Derrida on the Origin of Geometry’, in William R. McKenna and J. Claude Evans (eds.): Derrida and Phenomenology, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995, pp. 61–93, especially the footnote on pp. 87–88, in which the Derridean notions of sign and of writing as developed in the Introduction are deprived of some of their critical edge with respect to Husserl's notion of meaning.
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• This, then, is not entirely in agreement with the analyses presented by Len Lawlor, in his book, Derrida and Husserl: the Basic Problem of Phenomenology. See also the essay by Len Lawlor “The Relation as the Fundamental issue in Derrida”, in McKenna and Evans (eds.) 1995, pp. 151–184. Oddly, neither here nor in the subsequent book, Derrida and Husserl; the Basic Problem of Phenomenology, does he pursue the intimated underlying continuity of the readings of Husserl and of Freud.
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• See Eugen Fink and Edmund Husserl: Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method (1988), translated by Rudolf Bruzina, Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1995. See also the essay, Eugen Fink: ‘The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism’(1933), in R.O. Elveton (ed.) The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl; Selected Critical Readings, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970, pp 73–147. The latter was translated into French by Didier Franck.
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• An emphasis on a Kantian strand in Husserl's thought can be attributed to both Paul Ricœur and to Emmanuel Levinas, in their respective translations and commentaries on Husserl, in French, Levinas assisting in the preparation of Cartesian Meditations, in 1931; Ricœur translating Ideas I, or Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), first published by Husserl in 1913. For Ricœur on Husserl and Kant, see the essays collected as Paul Ricœur: Husserl: An Analysis of his Philosophy, translated by Edward Ballard and Lester Embree, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967.
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• The interaction with Levinas stretches from the long essay ‘Violence and metaphysics: an essay on Emmanuel Levinas’ first published in 1964, and in Jacques Derrida: Writing and Difference (1978), pp. 779–153, to Jacques Derrida: Adieu: to Emmanuel Levinas (1997), translated by Michael Naas and Pascale Anne Brault, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, and the intricacies of it cannot even be intimated here. For another approach to these questions, see Joanna Hodge: “Ethics and Time; Levinas between Kant and Husserl’ in Diacritics; Journal for Contemporary Criticism, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 1–26.
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• For Paul Celan see Jacques Derrida; ‘“A Self-Unsealing Poetic Text”: Poetics and Politics of Witnessing’, translated by Rachel Bowlby, in Michael Clark (ed.) Revenge of the Aesthetic; The Place of Literature in Theory Today, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, pp. 180–207.
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• Edmund Husserl and Ludwig Landgrebe: Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic (1939), translated by James Churchill and Karl Ameriks, Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. This, first published in 1939, almost immediately went out of print. Derrida in The Problem of Genesis marks a moment of inception for this text around 1919–1920.
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• Jacques Derrida; Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, Paris: Galilée, 2000.
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• One of Hopkins’ questions (see endnote six) to Derrida's reading of Husserl in his Introduction (1962) is precisely to this re-ontologising of the eidos and of the idealities revealed as a consequence of phenomenological reduction.
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• Jacques Derrida; Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (1993), translated from the French by Peggy Kamuf, London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
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• Jacques Derrida: Writing and Difference (1967), translated by Alan Bass, London and New York: Routledge, 1978, pp. 196–231.
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• See Martin Heidegger; Being and Time (1927), translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Blackwell, Oxford: 1962, and Martin Heidegger: Contributions to Philosophy; From Enowning (1989), translated by Kenneth Maly and Parvis Emad, Indiana University Press, Bloomington IN: 2001
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• See Edmund Husserl: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy—Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (1952), translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Visible and the Invisible (1964), edited by Claude Lefort, translated by Alfonso Lingis, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968.
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• See Jacques Derrida: ‘The Time of the Thesis; Punctuations’, translated by Kathleen McLaughlin, in Alan Montefiore (ed.): Philosophy in France Today, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 34–50, hereafter cited as TTP. For the distance taken up here with respect to Merleau-Pony see also Derrida: Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (2000).
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• See Jacques Derrida; ‘The Ends of Man’ in Derrida: Margins of Philosophy (1972), translated by Alan Bass, Brighton:Harvester, 1982, p. 122.
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• For an exhaustive and in the end negative reading of Derrida's text Voice and Phenomenon, see Natalie Alexander ‘The Hollow Deconstruction of Time’ pp. 121–150, in William R Mckenna and J. Claude Evans (eds.): Derrida and Phenomenology (1995). This pursues in admirable detail the violence Derrida does to Husserl's text, but does not question the various shifts in Derrida's modes of reading, from the careful reconstruction of a trajectory of thought, in 1953/54 to an exhaustive, if skewed interrogation of the single short text, in 1962, to this strange text from 1967. Nor is its place remarked, as part of the development of a diagnosis of the unfulfillable nature of the task, on each occasion, which philosophers set for themselves. However the central critique that “The Derridean deconstruction of time dissimulates protention” is important, since it permits the identification of a link from the early reading of Husserl to the later thinking of the a-venir both with and against Levinas. The difference for Derrida between protention, which originates in an intending consciousness, and the a-venir, which prompts the intending of consciousness, is one which deprives Alexander's critique of its force, and reveals that Derrida is thinking a futurity not with the active syntheses of protention and retention, but from the stance of the passive syntheses of a past, which was never present, and of an avenir, corresponding to such a past. This is the clue to the relevance of a Freudian thinking of time, for which there is a traumatic past which was never present, and a corresponding future which will never be present, in which analysis might be thought to be terminable.
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• See GWF Hegel: Science of Logic (1812) translated by A.V. Miller, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969.
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• See GWF Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) translated by A.V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
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• See Edmund Husserl: Phenomenological Psychology, Lectures from 1925 (HUA 9: 1962), translated by John Scanlon, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977 (9/3–234), supplementary material translated by Thomas Sheehan and Robert E. Palmer, as Edmund Husserl: Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931) (HUE 8), Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997 (9/237–349, 517–526). For Derrida's review see Les Etudes Philosophiques, 18.2, 1963, pp. 203–206.
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• The reference to the doubled notion of psyche, as soul and as mirror, sets up the connection to the explorations of this notion, as a continuation of the transcendental/empirical doubling of the ego, throughout Derrida's texts, gathered together as Psyche: Inventions de l'autre, tome I et II, Paris: Galilee, 1987–2003. The main essay from this appears as Jacques Derrida: ‘Psyche; Inventions of the Other’ in Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (eds.): Reading De Man Reading, Minnesota MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 1989, pp. 25–65.
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• For Derrida's essay on Bataille see Jacques Derrida: ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve’ in Derrida: Writing and Difference (1978) pp. 251–277.
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• See Edmund Husserl: The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936), translated by David Carr, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970 and Jacques Derrida: The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe (1991), translated by Pascale Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992.
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• Jacques Derrida contributed a short essay to the special number of Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory, 16.2, July 1993, on Jean Luc Nancy, entitled “Le Toucher”, translated by Peggy Kamuf.
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• The Other Heading, ibid. p. 79.
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• Martin Heidegger: Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929), fifth enlarged edition translated by Richard Taft, Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1997.
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• See Edmund Husserl: The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, edited by Edith Stein and Martin Heidegger, (1929) translated by James Churchill, Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1973, and the critical scholarly edition, Edmund Husserl: On the Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness 1893–1917 (HUA 10, 1966) translated by John Barnett Brough, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.
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• See Jacques Derrida: Given Time: 1: Counterfeit Money (1991), translated by Peggy Kamuf, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. See also Jacques Derrida: The Gift of Death (1992), translated by David Wills, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995. In the English translation of the latter, there is the following explanation of the relation between these two: “The French text of this essay, entitled ‘Donner la mort’ was published in a collection of papers from a conference held at Royaumont in December 1990, on ‘The Ethics of the Gift’ (ed. Jean-Michel Rabate and Michael Wetzel, L'éthique du don: Jacques Derrida et la pensée du don Paris: Transition, 1992). ‘Donner la mort’ is not however the paper Derrida delivered at that conference, that being part of a volume that was at the time already destined for publication (Donner le temps, Paris: Galilee, 1991) and now translated as Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money. Neither is The Gift of Death intended, as it might seem, to be the second volume of Given Time; it is instead a different reflection within a series on the question of the gift.” (p. vii).
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• For some of the complications here see Rudolf Bernet: Introduction to Edmund Husserl: Texte zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins (1893–1917) Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1985, pp. pp. X1–LXVII; see also essays collected in John B Brough and Lester Embree (eds.): The Many Faces of Time Contributions to Phenomenology no. 41, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers; 2000, especially the essay by Robert Welsh Jordan: ‘Time and Formal Authenticity’, pp. 37–66. See also Toine Kortooms: Phenomenology of Time: Edmund Husserl's Analysis of Time Consciousness, Kluwer Academic Press, Dordrecht, 2002, and the review of this and of Edmund Husserl: Die “Bernauer Manuskripte” über das Zeitbewußtsein, Husserliana volume 33, edited by Rudolf Bernet and Dietmar Lohmar, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001, Joanna Hodge: “Excesses of Subtlety; The Current Reception of Edmund Husserl in Journal for the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 35, no. 2, May 2004, pp. 208–213.
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• The exemplarity of the natural sciences for Husserl's phenomenology is already in evidence in the 1911 essay, Edmund Husserl: “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” translated by Quentin Lauer, in Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston (eds.): Husserl: Shorter Works, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, pp. 166–197. The adequacy of such a model is of course one of the various vectors of disagreement between the phenomenologies of Husserl and of Heidegger.
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• This is a shorter version of a longer text in preparation under the provisional title Derrida and Time. The work for this latter study was in part funded by an AHRB award, 2003–2004, for which grateful acknowledgement is here made.
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