ABSTRACT
Scholars have frequently wished to discredit deconstruction as a quietistic or aestheticist theory that must be dispensed with in the name of political responsibility. Yet a growing share among them turned to the revisionist or "existential" phenomenology fashioned in the twenties by the master's most famous apprentice, Martin Heidegger. Acknowledging the political disputes surrounding Heidegger's work, Wahl took care to distinguish it from what he called an "irrationalist philosophy". The idea of "genesis" now seemed to betray the fact that the transcendental ego-the very foundation of Husserlian doctrine-was thrown into a temporality it could not master. The theme was familiar, except that Derrida had now turned Heidegger's critique back upon Husserl-the student against the master. Indeed, one of the most intriguing implications of Derrida's legacy is that the critical impulse is never to be wholly mastered by the local context of meaning from which it is born.
