ABSTRACT
The conditions for a fulfilment of the meaning of time and the conditions for a
fulfilment of the meaning of genesis are distinct, and it is the latter which is the
focus for Derrida’s early text The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Phenomenology
(1953/54/1990).2 This citation, from a much later essay published in 2000,
draws attention to the bivalence of Husserl’s questioning of intuitions of
meaning: they are either full or empty, and their protentions may be either ful-
filled or disappointed. I shall explore here the manner in which Derrida devel-
ops Husserl’s own notion of the Idea in the Kantian sense, to reveal an
operation of a further Kantian concept, that of transcendental illusion, in which
empty intuitions are taken to be fulfilled, or an intuition, fulfilled at the empiri-
cal level, is falsely taken to be fulfilled at the transcendental level as well. At
times, Derrida seems to suggest that these illusions are necessary for the func-
tioning of meaning and reason. Thus, an analysis of various distinct deploy-
ments of the Idea in the Kantian sense, by both Husserl and Derrida, and
indeed by Kant, at times covers over an even more telling deployment by Derrida
of the Kantian notion of transcendental illusion, as analysed in the Dialectic of
the Critique of Pure Reason.3 This refers back to the amphibology of concepts, as
discussed at the conclusion of the Analytic of Principles of Concepts, analysing
the twin errors of taking an empirical deployment of a concept for a transcen-
dental one, and of a transcendental deployment for an empirical one, errors
which Kant ascribes to Leibniz and to Locke respectively (Kant: A 271, B 327).
In the first part of this section, I shall explore how Derrida’s attention to Hus-
serl’s use of the Idea in the Kantian sense provides the outline of an imperfect
formalisation for his reading of the strengths and lacunae of Husserl’s enquiries,
and in the second part of this section, I go on to discuss the workings of this
concept of illusion.
