ABSTRACT
Edmund Husserl discusses language and the sign in the context of a phenomenology which is quite Platonist in various respects, including the foundational role of the distinction between the Inside and the Outside, Internal and External. The internal mental life is that of transcendental phenomenology, according to which expression is always animated by meaning and the meaning is always understood as the intention internal consciousness has towards an object. Speech must be understood with reference to its indicative material side and not through the kind of ‘interior monologue’ constructed by Husserl. Husserl’s interior monologue is a product of his view of expression excluding, indication. The interior monologue is free of signs since it is just consciousness speaking to itself. For Jacques Derrida, language is necessarily material, contextual, and intersubjective. It cannot be within consciousness in any kind of primary way. In soliloquy one speaks to oneself, and employs words as signs.
