ABSTRACT
Before placing Husserl’s noematic meaning in our schema of saturated and reduced discourses, the sign systems of “Pandora” and “Occam,” I want to address a recent tendency in the reading of Husserl which finds its perhaps most outspoken expression in Michel Pecheux’s Language, Semantics and Ide ology. A highly fruitful and challenging account of how ideological effects per vade discourses, Pecheux’s analysis is bent on showing how Husserl’s analysis is vitiated by an idealist metaphysic and a subjectivist theory of meaning in which individual consciousness is the “zero point” and the “origin” of representations, and so of meaning.1 We leave aside for the moment Husserl’s idealism in the sense of an attempt to anonymize a general mathesis from the specifics of di rectional acts of consciousness.2 It is Pecheux’s charge of the subjective origin of meaning which needs to be challenged.
