ABSTRACT

Derrida’s writing on Edmund Husserl has attracted surprisingly little attention. Yet the reading of Husserl has both a distinctive and seminal position in Derrida’s philosophy. Derrida uses his critique of Husserl to develop the theme of ‘the play of life and death’, which is so much in evidence in his later work. Although Derrida’s professed interests are literary or semiotic, his treatment of Husserl is based on the view that ‘phenomenology, the metaphysics of presence in the form of ideality, is also a philosophy of life’. Husserl’s philosophy arises out of a quest for a dimension of absolute certainty. Husserl was convinced that Western empiricism was too naive and incomplete to be the basis of a truly certain science. Derrida’s critique of phenomenology depends largely upon two well-known areas of weakness in Husserl’s thinking: the problems of time and other persons.