The problem of Genesis in Husserl's philosophy / Jacques Derrida ; translated by Marian Hobson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Derrida, Jacques.

Standardized Title:

Problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl. English

Language:

English

French

Subjects (All):

Husserl, Edmund, 1859-1938.

Husserl, Edmund.

Beginning--History--20th century.

Beginning.

History.

Creation.

Physical Description:

xliii, 228 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Language Note:

Translated from the French.

Summary:

Derrida's first book-length work, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy, was originally written as a dissertation for his diplome d'etudes superieures in 1953 and 1954. Surveying Husserl's major works on phenomenology, Derrida reveals what he sees as an internal tension in Husserl's central notion of genesis, and gives us our first glimpse into the concerns and frustrations that would later lead Derrida to abandon phenomenology and develop his now famous method of deconstruction. For Derrida, the problem of genesis in Husserl's philosophy is that both temporality and meaning must be generated by prior acts of the transcendental subject, but transcendental subjectivity must itself be constituted by an act of genesis. Hence, the notion of genesis in the phenomenological sense underlies both temporality and atemporality, history and philosophy, resulting in a tension that Derrida sees as ultimately unresolvable yet central to the practice of phenomenology.

Ten years later, Derrida moved away from phenomenology entirely, arguing in his introduction to Husserl's posthumously published Origin of Geometry and his own Speech and Phenomena that the phenomenological project has neither resolved this tension nor expressly worked with it. The Problem of Genesis complements these other works, showing the development of Derrida's approach to phenomenology as well as documenting the state of phenomenological thought in France during a particularly fertile period, when Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Tran-Duc-Thao, as well as Derrida, were all working through it. But the book is most important in allowing us to follow Derrida's own development as a philosopher by tracing the roots of his later work in deconstruction to these early critical reflections on Husserl's phenomenology.

Contents:

Part I The Dilemmas of Psychological Genesis: Psychologism and Logicism

1 Meeting the Problem 9

2 A First Recourse to Genesis: Intentional Psychologism 16

3 The Dissociation. The Abandoning of Genesis and the Logicist Temptation 34

Part II The "Neutralization" of Genesis

4 Noematic Temporality and Genetic Temporality 53

5 The Radical [characters not reproducible] and the Irreducibility of Genesis 70

The Reduction and the Idealist Exclusion of Genesis 71

Genesis of Perception: Hyle and Morphe 83

Noetic Temporality. Insufficiency of a Static Constitution 90

Part III The Phenomenological Theme of Genesis: Transcendental Genesis and "Worldly" Genesis

6 Birth and Becoming of Judgment 103

7 The Genetic Constitution of the Ego and the Passage to a New Form of Transcendental Idealism 130

Part IV Teleology. The Sense of History and the History of Sense

8 The Birth and Crises of Philosophy 153

9 The First Task of Philosophy: The Reactivation of Genesis 161

10 The History of Philosophy and the Transcendental Motive 170.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [215]-220) and index.

ISBN:

0226143155

OCLC:

51093269