Jacques Derrida and Husserl’s phenomenology

Abstract

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), the leading representative of deconstruction, conducted a critical reading of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, highlighting its internal aporias and reconfiguring the foundations of fundamental questions related to language, temporality, and subjectivity. Based on the 1967 work The Voice and the Phenomenon, we seek to understand how Derrida develops a rigorous analysis of Husserl's notions of consciousness, presence, and meaning, formulating a critique that is at once an innovative reinterpretation. Husserl sought to establish a rigorous science of experience, centered on the intuition of the essences of phenomena as they appear to consciousness. Derrida directly confronts these Husserlian assumptions, proposing that phenomenology cannot escape the mediation of language and time, which prevents access to a “pure origin” or “full presence.” We thus seek to highlight the main points of this critique. Derrida's critique in The Voice and the Phenomenon is not a rejection of phenomenology, but a radicalization of its central questions, demonstrating that Husserl's search for full presence is unfeasible because meaning is always mediated by language, time, and difference. Derrida thus inaugurates a new field of thought that questions the metaphysical foundations of the West and redefines the ways in which we understand language, temporality, and subjectivity.