Jacques Derrida Voice and Phenomenon Introduction To The Problem of The Sign in Husserls Phenomenology [PDF]

Zitiervorschau

VOICE

AND

PHENOMENON

V O I C E AND P HE NOME NON Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl's Phenomenology

Jacques Derrida

Translated from the French by Leonard Lawlor

Northwestern University Press Evanston, Illinois

Northwestern University Press www. im press, northw estern.edu Copyright © 2011 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2011. All rights reserved. Originally p ub lish ed in French under the title L a voix et le phénomène by Presses Universitaires de France, 1967. Printed in the U nited States o f A m erica 10

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Library o f Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data D errida, Ja cq u es. [Voix et le p h én om ène. English] Voice an d ph en om en o n : introduction to the p ro b lem o f the sign in H u sserl’s ph en om enology / Ja c q u e s D errida ; translated from the F ren ch by L eon ard Lawlor. p. cm. — (N orthw estern University studies in p h en om en ology anci existential philosophy) “O riginally published in Fren ch u nder the title L a voix et le p h én om èn e by Presses U niversitaires cle France, 1967”— T.p. verso. Includes bibliographical ref erences anci inclex. ISB N 978-0-8101-2765-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. H usserl, Eclmuncl, 1859-1938. 2. Phenom enology. 3. Signs ancl symbols. 4. M eaning (Philosophy) 5. D ifference (Philosophy) I. Lawlor, L eon ard, 1954- II. Title. III. Series: N orthw estern University studies in p h en om en o l­ ogy 8c existential philosophy. B3279.H 94D 3813 2011 142.7— clc22 2011012609 © T h e p ap e r u sed in this publication m eets the m inim um requirem ents o f the A m erican N ational Standard for Inform ation Scien ces— P erm an en ce o f P ap er for Printed Library M aterials, A N SI Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgm ents

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Translator's Introduction: The Germinal Structure of Derrida's Thought

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Translator's Note Introduction

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Sign and Signs

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The Reduction of Indication

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Meaning as Soliloquy

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Meaning and Representation

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The Sign and the Blink of an Eye

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The Voice That Keeps Silent

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The Originative Supplement

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgments

While what I have p ro d u ced counts as a new translation o f D errid a’s 1967 L a voix et le phénomène, it is profoundly indebted to David Allison and to his original 1973 English translation, which appeared un der the title Speech ancl Phenomena. Professor Allison trained me at Stony B rook University, an d his English translation h elped train a generation o f An­ glophon e ph ilosoph ers in D errid a’s thought. It is hard for me to express the extent o f my gratitude toward David B. Allison. I m ust thank R onald Bruzina, who carefully read the first draft o f this translation and gave me countless invaluable suggestions for revisions. Elizabeth R ottenberg also advised m e con cern in g a variety o f translation problem s. T hanks are also due to Jo e Balay, A aron Krem pa, and C am eron O ’M ara at Penn State University who read later drafts; D aniel P alu m bo assisted in the p roo fread in g and indexing. I am especially grateful to Anthony Steinbock for his suggestions regard in g the translation and for his support o f the entire project.

Translator's Introduction: The Germinal Structure of Derrida's Thought

Published in 1967, when D errida was thirty-seven years old, Voice and Phe­ nomenon1 ap p eared at the sam e m om ent as Of Grammatologf and Writing and Difference} All three books an noun ced the new philosophical project called “d econ struction .” A lthough D errida would later regret the fate o f the term “decon struction ,”4 he would use it throughout his career to d e­ fine his own thinking. While Writing and Difference collects essays written over a ten-year period on diverse figures and topics, and while O f Gram­ matology aims its deconstruction at “the age o f R ousseau,” Voice and Phe­ nomenon shows deconstruction en gaged with the m ost im portant philo­ sophical m ovem ent o f the last h un d red years: ph en om enology.5 Only in relation to ph en om en ology is it possible to m easure the im portance o f deconstruction. Only in relation to H u sserl’s philosophy is it possible to u n derstand the novelty o f D errid a’s thinking. Voice and Phenomenon therefore may be the best introduction to D errid a’s thought in general. It is possible to say o f it what D errida says o f H u sserl’s Logical Investiga­ tions. Voice and Phenomenon contains “the germ inal structure” of D errida’s entire thought (3). The structure involves three features (which are presented in the three sections o f this in troduction ). First, and this is the most obvious feature, D errid a’s thought is structured aroun d the con cept o f d eco n ­ struction. But the con cept o f deconstruction can be determ ined only in relation to what it criticizes: “the m etaphysics o f p resen ce.” T he m eta­ physics o f presence is a closed system, determ in in g the concept of sign (and m ore generally language) as derivative, as a m odification o f pres­ ence and having no other purpose than representing presence. Starting with presence and ending with presence, m etaphysics form s a circular enclosure. Second, D errid a’s thought is structured by classical form s o f argum en tation , in particular, by the investigation o f unacknow ledged presupposition s. But it is also structured by the invention o f new con­ cepts: différance, the trace (or w riting), and supplem entarity. Reconceiv­ ing the sign (or m ore generally lan gu age), these unclassical concepts are defined by im possible propositions, which, when deposited into the m etaphysical system, stop the circle from bein g form ed. They attem pt

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to open the enclosure o f m etaphysics. T h erefore, third, like so m uch o f the French philosophy developed in the 1960s,6 D errida’s thought is structured by an exitin g m ovem ent, a line o f flight to the outside. T hat the outside is a sort o f utopian non-place, an “elsew here,” in which it is possible to think and live differently, indicates what m otivates d eco n ­ struction. As we shall see, there are two motivations for deconstruction, m otivations which one m ight find surprising if one is fam iliar with the way D errid a’s thought was appropriated and popularized during his own lifetime. D errida’s thought is m otivated by the desire for truth and for the transform ation o f all values. Undoubtedly, these are new concepts o f truth and value, but they are truth an d value nevertheless.

First Structural Feature: The Deconstruction of Phenomenology as the Metaphysics of Presence None o f the 1967 books, including Voice and Phenomenon, provides a for­ mal definition of decon struction .7 But soon after, D errida form u lated one. In the 1971 interview “Positions,” D errida states that deconstruction consists o f two p h ases.8 T he first, which is critical, attacks the classical oppositions that structure philosophy. T hese oppositions, D errida states, are subordinating; they are hierarchies.9 T he first phase o f deconstruc­ tion “reverses” the hierarchies. In order to reverse, D errida focuses on the presupposition s o f the superior term ’s authority. U nder scrutiny, it turns out that the superior term presupposes traits found in the subor­ dinate term. The sharing o f traits points to a necessary structure at the base o f the hierarchy itself. So, a second phase aims at m arking the basic necessary structure; it aims at m arking the relation, the difference or hiatus that m ade the hierarchical opposition possible in the first place (fo r D errid a’s use o f the word “h iatu s,” see 1 8 ).10 T he basic necessary structure is the “last court of ap p eal” (8), the law for the “distribution” o f the term s or ideas foun d in the oppositions (13). Yet, the necessary structure is aporetical insofar as it cannot be determ ined by the terms in the hierarchical opposition it m akes possible. Indeed, the necessary structure is so basic, so fundam ental, so transcen dental— D errida calls it “ultra-transcendental” (1 3 )— that it cannot be nam ed properly or ad ­ equately; all nam es selected to designate it will have been determ in ed by the very opposition s and hierarchies that the structure conditioned or generated. Nevertheless, D errida will nam e the structure by m eans o f what he calls “paleonym s,” that is, with old nam es inherited fro m these

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oppositions and h ierarch ies.11 In his reutilization o f these nam es, Der­ rida aim s “at the em ergence o f a new ‘co n cep t,’ a concept that no longer lets itself, and has never let itself be included in the previous regim e.”12 T herefore, while decon struction ’s first phase operates on the terrain of the philosophical oppositions being reversed since the subordinate term holds the position o f superiority in the sam e hierarchy, the second phase, through these new concepts (which are also new ways o f thinking and living), aim s to m ove beyond and exit the terrain o f the philosophical op p o sitio n .13 Even though it does n ot explicitly form u late this definition of deconstruction, Voice and Phenomenon operates on the basis o f the two phases o f reversal internal to the terrain and on new concept em ergence with the aim o f exiting the terrain. While working through ph en om en ol­ ogy in general, Voice and Phenomenons deconstruction specifically targets H u sserl’s early Logical Investigations (1 9 0 0-1901), and in particular the First Logical Investigation. D errida selects the First Logical Investigation because it concerns the sign as a means o f access to the ideal m eanings o f logic. Voice and Phenomenon s subtitle is, o f course, “Introduction to the Problem o f the Sign in H u sserl’s Phenom enology.” The problem of the sign com es from the fact, as H usserl recognizes in the First Investiga­ tion, that there is an am biguity in the notion o f the sign .14 Som etim es, Husserl notices, signs function to indicate a factual state o f affairs, while at other tim es they function to express an ideal m eaning. T his intertwin­ ing o f the indicative function with the expressive function is especially evident in com m unication (17). H usserl therefore attem pts to m ake an “essential distin ction ” within this intertwining. H usserl wants to d isen ­ tangle expression from indication, exclu de indication from expression. Expression seem s to present, while indication, an indicative sign, merely m anifests som ething absent. Because expression presents, H usserl valo­ rizes it over indication; only expression gives us access to ideal m eanings. So, in Voice and Phenomenon, the d econ struction works first by D errida reversing the hierarchy between expression and indication (18). U sing argum entation internal to phenom enology, he shows that the indicative function, in particular, the trait o f one thing bein g in the place o f an­ other, makes expression possible. In the indicative function o f “bein g in place o f,” D errida sees an irreducible repeatability. Repeatability is the necessary structure prior to the hierarchical opposition o f expression and indication. Repeatability is that to which the new concepts or the new nam es o f “differen ce,” “trace” (or “w riting”), and “supplem entarity” refer; all three o f these concepts, being prior to and beyo-nd the op­ position between expression and indication, point to an “elsew here” of phenom enology (53).

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D errida develops the new concepts o f difference, trace (or writ­ ing), and supplem entarity, however, not in relation to the hierarchy lo­ cated merely within H u sserl’s phenom enology, but in relation to a hier­ archy that determ ines Western m etaphysics in general, the hierarchy o f presence over the sign. H u sserl’s philosophy belongs to “the philosophy” (44), it belongs to what D errida calls “the m etaphysics o f presen ce” (22). The phrase “the m etaphysics o f p resen ce” has been the locus o f much controversy insofar as it seem s to h om ogenize the history o f Western philosophy. Nevertheless the application o f the phrase seem s to be ju sti­ fied. U sing the term in its Kantian sense, Derr ida speaks o f “sch em as” o f m etaphysics, outlines that allow the general concept o f m etaphysics to be unified with the em pirical events o f the history o f W estern phi­ losophy. D espite the diversity o f its events, Western philosophy exhib­ its schem as such as the substance-attributes relation, where substance is the presen t bein g which the attributes modify; or the subject-object opposition, where the subject is presence an d the object is relative to the subject (72 n ote). D errida is especially interested in the schema o f deri­ vation (44). In H u sserl’s p h en om en ology and in Western m etaphysics in general, language, and in particular the sign, are conceived as being derived from perception or thought, that is, from intuitive presence or self-presence— as if p erception and th ought were in d ep en d en t o f the sign, as if the sign som ehow supervened upon perception or thought as a kind o f accid en t.15 M aking the sign derivative opens the way fo r it to be conceived m erely as a m odification o f presence or as merely relative to presence (44). The general con cept o f m etaphysics to which these schem as refer­ is com plicated. It first o f all involves a decision. Metaphysics is based on a decision about how to answer the question o f what the sign and m ore generally lan gu age is. As D errida says, “how to justify . . . the decision which subordinates a reflection on the sign to a logic?” (7, D errid a’s em ­ phasis). T he decision seems to be ju stified on the basis o f the knowledge we have o f ourselves in the clarity o f self: presen ce; it is based on the foundation, as in Descartes, o f the “I am ,” the foundation o f subjectivity and consciousness (46). T herefore in m etaphysics, because we seem to know who we are, because we seem to be presen t to ourselves, because we seem to be presen t, we desire the sam e, presence and self-presence (8 9 ).16 Like the decision from which it flows, this desire, which values nothing other than presence, also defines the metaphysics o f presence. T h e d e sire m ust be fulfilled. On the basis o f Derr id a ’s translation o f H u sserl’s G erm an term “B ed eu tu n g ” (m eaning) as “vouloir-dire” (ren­ dered in this translation occasionally as “wanting-to-say”), it is clear that

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voluntarism, “voluntaristic m etaphysics,” is at issue (29). The fulfillm ent o f the desire for presence then is brough t about by the will, un derstood as the faculty that calculates m eans and ends. Motivated by the desire for presence, the will wills the m eans which lead to the end or purpose o f presence. T he m eans are a technology o f the sign, the “technical m as­ tery” o f the sign (65). T echniques o f speaking and writing (especially phonetic writing [69] ) m aster the sign insofar as they reduce, elim inate, and purify the sign o f any aspect o f it which potentially contributes to equivocity or obscurity; the purification results in the sign being as univ­ ocal and diaph an ous as the soun d o f my own voice (66 for diaphaneity, 80 for univocity). In other words, the technology attem pts to lim it the sense o f the sign (and that o f re-presentation and repetition) so that the sign functions as nothing m ore than a detou r through which pres­ ence returns to itself. T he m etaphysical will wants that the potencies o f repetition be lim ited to those o f saving p resen ce (43 fo r saving p res­ ence; 65 for p oten cies). Lim itin g the p oten cies o f repetition to p res­ ence (lim iting to what D errida, follow ing H usserl, calls “the relation to the ob ject” [84] ) ,17 repetition is always bent back into the circle o f an enclosure. M etaphysics is a closed system; the m etaphysics o f presence is, as D errida says, “the closure o f m etaphysics” (4 4 ).18 C losure m eans that the fou n din g axiom or principle contains in advance deductively the final conclusion or con sequen ce so that no new possibility appears as one moves from proposition to proposition within the system.19 If no un-implied possibility supervenes on the system, then it is possible to live within the security o f presen ce and proximity. The limitation therefore am ounts to thinking and living within the security o f the answ er— the only answ er given so fa r — to the question o f the m ean in g o f being: presence. We can recapitulate the general concept o f metaphysics in this way. The gen eral con cept (which is schem atized onto particular historical events o f Western philosophy) includes five traits: decision, desire, will, closure, and security. First, it includes a decision as to how to answer the question o f the m ean in g o f being. That answer is presence. Second, from that answer, a desire flows, a desire for presence. Third, in order to ful­ fill the desire, the will is required. The will wills certain m eans to the p u rp o se o f fulfilling the desire. Fourth, the willing o f these m eans (tech­ niques aim ing at m astering repetition) m akes a circle: what was intended at the beginning is found at the end. Metaphysics is a closed system; it is an enclosure. S o , fifth, there is security within the enclosure. We m ight even say, as D errida would, that within the enclosure life is not risked; contam ination, disease, death, foreignness, an d alterity, all o f these have

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been push ed to the outside. Yet, in truth, is the enclosure this secure? And if truthfully the enclosure is porous, must we not change the m eaning o f who we are} We shall return to these question s in the third section. As the phrase “the m etaphysics o f p rese n ce ” indicates, what is at the center o f D errid a’s con cept o f m etaphysics is presence. What is pres­ ence? Presence is first and forem ost the content o f an intuition. Being the content of an intuition means that presence is defined as what is avail­ able “in front o f” my eyes or look. In m etaphysics, the principal m ean­ ing o f bein g is “being-in-front” ; D errida uses the phrase “être-devant,” in which we can see the word “pres-ence,” the Latin “prae” (before) + “esse” (being) (64). Bein g is what is before, nearby, and proxim ate and therefore what is without distance or hiatus. The content o f an intuition, however, is diverse and changing. So secondly, presence means the form that rem ains the sam e th rou ghout the diversity o f content. This dual definition o f presence is synonymous, D errida asserts, with “the founding opposition o f m etaphysics”: potentiality (intuitive content) and actuality (form al idea) (53; see also 6). To conceive, however; the actual form al idea as otherw orldly is Platonism , “conventional Platonism ” (45); it is, as H usserl would say, to fall into “degen erate m etaphysics.” In contrast, “authentic m etaphysics” for H usserl conceives the ideal form (ideality) — “the authentic m ode o f ideality” (5) — as a repeatable form in which the diverse content will always appear, to infinity. As Derr i has always been and will always b e, to infinity, the form in which . . . the infinite diversity o f contents will be p ro d u ce d ” (6). H usserl determ ines being, then, not only as what is in front but also as ideality (4 5 -4 6 ), not only “being-in-front,” bu t also “ideal-being” (65). With these two senses o f being, H usserl recognizes (as H egel does) that form must be filled with content, that the form must be lived. But H usserl also recognizes that the repeatability “to infinity” o f the form is never given as such (87). The repeatability o f the form is always that o f the indefinite (87). T he indefi­ niteness o f the repeatable form implies that intuitive presen ce will always be incom plete and non-full; there will always be more content. But for Husserl, the lack o f intuitive fullness is only pro-visional (83). In other words, whenever presence is not full, whenever it is threatened with non­ presence due to the ever-changing content, presence is posited as a telos. Presence was full and close by in the past and it will be full and close by in the future. “B ein g” (presence) is the first and last word o f m etaphys­ ics, w hether what is at issue is “d egen erate m etaphysics” or “authentic m etaphysics.” We are on the verge of exam in in g the secon d structural feature o f D errid a’s thinking, the argum entation used in Voice and Phenomenon

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in particular and in decon struction in gen eral. But before we turn to that argum entation, we should note one aspect o f deconstruction that we had not seen before: d econ struction aim s to break out o f the clo­ sure o f metaphysics by interrupting m etaphysics’ circular m ovem ent. As we have seen, deconstruction first reverses the oppositional hierarchy o f presence and the sign (or m ore locally, in H usserl, reverses the op p o si­ tional hierarchy o f expression and in dication ). In the reversal (in the first phase o f decon struction ), the subordinate term, the sign, becom es the principal term. Because the m ost general sense o f the sign is “beingfo r” or “being-in-place-of” (21), the sign coincides with re-presentation. What has then becom e foundational in the reversal is a term determ ined by and found within metaphysics: “representation” (38 n o te ). But m aking representation foundational m eans that the “re-” o f the re-presentation is no lon ger a m odification supervening on a sim ple presence. The “re-” o f repetition precedes what is repeated, precedes perception or intuitive presence, p recedes form or idea, so that everything seem s to begin with re-presentation (38 n ote). M ore precisely, the phase o f reversal results in the subordinate term bein g reconceived. We have now passed to the second phase o f deconstruction. In the second phase re-presentation has been reconceived in aw ay that is contradictory. T he “re-” o f re-presentation necessarily m akes the repetition be a second or a supplem ent; the “re-” seem s to m ake all representations and signs nothing m ore than m odi­ fications o f som eth ing given beforeh an d, som eth ing like a m odel. But in sofar as repetition (through the reversal) is foundational, it is also or at once a first or an origin. It becom es, as the oxym oronic title o f ch ap­ ter 7 says, “an originative su p plem en t.” As we move from the first phase o f deconstruction to the second, we have rem ained within the system o f m etaphysics since we are still using the nam e “representation.” But we have also “deposited” within the system “contradictory or untenable p ro p ­ ositions” (49 n ote), im possible propositions such as “everything begins with represen tation ”; “the secon d is first”; “the origin is a su pplem en t.” T hese im possible or absurd, even false propositions provide the co n cep­ tual core o f différance, the trace (or w riting), and, as we see here, supplementarity. Done from within a certain inside o f the system (within the hierarchy o f presence over the sign), the depositin g o f these aporetical propositions and unclassical concepts interrupts the circular m ovem ent and “opens [the closure o f m etaphysics] to its ou tside” (49 n ote). T h e contradictory proposition s open the system because they do not fu nc­ tion as pointing to an object or to a subject, to a form or to a content; they point to nothing that could be present as such. They point beyond presence.

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Second Structural Feature: The Basic Argumentation for the Reversal of the Hierarchy of Presence over the Sign In general, the argum entation in Voice and Phenomenon dem onstrates the lack o f cognitive foun dation , that is, the lack o f self-presence, for the security o f the m etaphysical decision. M ore specifically, one finds three overlapping argum ents in consecutive ord er in chapters 4, 5, and 6. As we have seen, in the First Logical Investigation, in order to gain access to ideal m eanings, H usserl wants to separate expression from indication. H e thinks he can find expression in its pure state when com m unication with others has been suspen ded, in other words, in interior m onologue, “in the solitary life o f the sou l.” Derr ida tells us that, in order to support the dem onstration o f indication being separate from expression in inte­ rior m onologue, H usserl appeals to two types o f argum ents (41). Voice and Phenomenons ch apter 4 concerns H u sserl’s first type o f argum ent. H ere is D errida’s sum m ary o f it: In internal discourse, I com m unicate n othing to myself. I indicate noth­ ing to myself. I can at m ost im agine m yself do in g that, I can merely represen t m yself as m anifesting som eth in g to myself. H ere we have only a representation ancl an imagination. (41)

As we can see from this quote, the first argum ent revolves around the role that representation plays in language. In interior m on ologue, it looks as though one does not really com m unicate anything to oneself; it seem s as though one merely im agines or represents on eself as a speaking and com m unicating subject. For D errida, this claim is problem atic because H usserl uses the word “represen tation ” in m any senses: representation as the locus o f ideality in general (Vorstellung); representation as repeti­ tion or reproduction o f presentation {Vergegenwärtigung as m odifying Gegenwcirtigung) ; and finally representation as taking the place o f another Vorstellung (Repräsentation) (42). On the one hand, therefore, it seem s as though H usserl applies to lan guage the fundam ental distin ction — “an essential distinction,” “a sim ple exteriority”— between reality as factuality and representation as ideality (representation in the sense o f Vorstel­ lung) (42). The distinction seem s to imply, accordin g to D errida, that representation as ideality is neither essential nor constitutive but merely an accident contingently ad din g itself to the actual or factual practice o f discourse. But, as D errida points out, when I actually use words, that is, when I con sider signs in general, without any concern for the purpose o f com m unication, “I m ust from the outset operate (in) a structure o f

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repetition whose elem ent can only be representative” (42). D errida says, “A ph on em e or graph em e is necessarily always other, to a certain extent, each time that it is presented in a procedu re or a perception, but it can function as a sign and as lan guage in general only if a form al identity al­ lows it to be reissued and to be recogn ized” (43). In other words, the sign in general m ust be an em pirical event— “necessarily always oth er”— and it m ust be repeatable— “form al identity.” T his definition o f the sign — a sign consists in a minimally iterable fo rm — m eans that actual lan guage is ju st as representative or im aginary as im aginary lan guage and that im aginary or representative lan guage is ju st as actual as actual language. W hether representative— “I think that I ’m speaking when I speak to my­ se lf” {Je me représente que je parle quand je me parlé)— or actual— “I am actu­ ally speaking when I speak to som eon e else” {Je parle effectivement quand je parle à quelqu’un d ’autre)— the sign in general is re-presentational. On the other hand, if it is the case that when I speak to m yself I am only im agining m yself doin g so, only thinking I am doing so {je me représente) , then it seem s as though my interior m onologue is worked over by fiction (48). If this is so, then it seem s that the consciousness in interior m ono­ logue is determ in ed entirely as false consciousness (49). T he access to the epistem ological grounds o f logic then seem s jeop ard ized . But there is a further problem with representation. A ccording to D errida, H usserl in the p h en om en ological m eth od has privileged fiction, the fiction of im agination; by m eans o f im aginative variation, one is able to neutral­ ize the existence o f a thing and thereby generate an ideality (47). But H u sserl’s conception o f “neutrality m odification” never calls into ques­ tion the determ ination o f the im age as a representation in the sense o f Vergegenwärtigung, that is, in the sense o f a representation that refers to som ething non-present. In other words, in interior m onolog ue, the sense o f representation appropriate to indication seem s necessary for expres­ sion —ju st as in actual com m unication the sense o f represen tation ap­ propriate to expression seem s necessary to indication. T he iterability o f the sign (repeatability, or re-presentation in all senses), therefore, casts d ou bt on H u sserl’s attem pt to distinguish essentially between im agined speech as in interior m o n ologu e and actual or em pirical speech as in com m unication, in short, between expression and indication. Voice and Phenomenons ch apter 5 concerns H u sserl’s second type o f argum ent to dem onstrate that expression can be separated from indica­ tion in interior m onologue. H ere is D errid a’s sum m ary of it: In internal discourse, I com m u nicate nothing to m yself ancl I can only p reten d to, because I have no need ίο communicate anything to myself. Such an o p eration — com m unication from self to se lf— cannot take place

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because it would m ake no sense. Ancl it would m ake no sense because it would have no purpose. T h e existence o f psychical acts does not have to be indicated (recall that only an existence can in general be indicated) because the existence o f psychical acts is im m ediately presen t to the subject in the p resen t instant. (41, D errid a’s em phasis)

A ccording to H usserl, since lived-experience seem s to be im m ediately selfLpresent in the m ode o f certitude and absolute necessity, signs are use­ less, that is, the m anifestation o f the self to the self through the delega­ tion of an indicative sign is superfluous. T here is no need for or purpose to indicative signs here, since there seem s to be no alterity, no difference in the identity o f presence as self-presence. Because H usserl says (in the First L o gical Investigation, §8) that “the acts in question are lived by us at that very instant [im selben Augenblick, literally, “in the blink o f an eye”] ” (cited in 41), D errida claim s that H u sserl’s im m ediate self-presence has to dep en d on the present taken as a now and that dependen ce on the now leads D errida to investigate H u sserl’s Phenomenology of Internal TimeConsciousness (51). T h ese description s of internal time consciousn ess attem pt to d escribe the exp erien ce o f time (tem poralization), but espe­ cially the experience o f the present as I live it right now: the living present. As D errida reads it, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, on the one hand, indicates that the living present seem s to have a center which is the now point. But, on the oth er hand, the time lectures indi­ cate that the living present seems to be thick; it includes the im m ediate m em ory (called the retention) o f the now that has ju st elapsed and the anticipation (called the protention) o f the now that is about to appear. For H usserl, the retentional phase is different from m em ory in the usual sense, which he calls secondary m em ory; the usual sense o f m em ory is defined by representation (Vergegenwärtigung). Because o f the thickness, what is at issue, for Derrida, is precisely the kind o f difference that one can establish between the reten tion al ph ase o f the living presen t and secondary memory. In oth er words, what is at stake is the kind o f dif­ ference we can establish between Gegenwärtigung and Vergegenwärtigung, between presentation and re-presentation. While H usserl shows in The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness the irreducibility of Vergegen­ wärtigung to Gegenwärtigung, D errida nevertheless in terrogates— without questioning the dem onstrative validity o f this distinction— “the eviden­ tiary soil and the milieu o f these distinctions, . . . [that is] what relates the terms distinguished to one an oth er and constitutes the very possibility o f the comparison ’ (55, Derr id a ’s em phasis). It is im portant to recognize that D errida is not claim ing that there is no difference between retention and secondary m em ory (or Vergegenwärtigung). Instead, because H usserl

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in §16 calls retention a “non-perception,” D errida argues that there m ust be a continuity between retention and secondary m em ory such that it is im possible to claim that there is a radical discontinuity or a radical dif­ ference between retention and re-presentation; and therefore because the living presen t is thick, because the now cannot be separated from retention, there must be no radical difference between re-presentation and presentation or between non-perception and perception (55). As D errida says, As soon as we adm it this continuity o f the now and the non-now, o f p er­ ception anci non-perception in the zone o f original ity that is com m on to originary im pression ancl to retention, we welcom e the oth er into the self-iclentity o f the A ugenblick, non-presence ancl non-eviclentness into the blink of an eye of the instant. T h ere is a duration to the blink o f an eye ancl the duration closes the eye. This alterity is even the condition of p resence, o f presen tation , ancl therefore o f Vorstellung in general, p rior to all the dissociations which coulcl be p rod u ced there. (56)

Within the duration, there is an alterity, a heterogeneity between p ercep­ tion and non-perception which is also a continuity. Between retention and re-production, there is only a difference between two m odifications o f non-perception (56). T herefore, as Derrida concludes, the alterity o f the blink o f the eye “cuts into, at its roots,” the argum en t concerning the uselessness o f the sign in the self-relation (57). We have been con siderin g the argum entation found in chapters 4 and 5, but the heart o f Voice and Phenomenon lies in chapter 6. C hapter 6 concerns the voice o f the title Voice and Phenomenon, the voice in interior m onologue. For H usserl, accordin g to D errida— here D errida relies on H u sserl’s description in Ideas /§ 1 2 4 -°— sense (a thought) is gen erated from a stratum o f silence, “the absolute silence o f the selfLrelation” (59). Sense must be gen erated as an object repeatable to infinity (a univer­ sality) and yet remain close by to the acts o f repetition (proxim ity). In oth er words, sense m ust be sim ultaneously present in the sen se o f an object (the relation to the ob-ject as over and against) and present in the sen se o f the subject (the proxim ity to se lf in identity, as close as possible), both ideal-being an d being-in-front together. In order for this to happen, a specific m edium or elem ent o f expression is n eeded; that m edium or elem ent is the voice (65). Sense is going to be generated by m eans o f hearing-oneself-speak, by m eans o f this specific kind o f autoaffection (67). In effect, D errida provides a phen om en ological descrip­ tion o f hearing-oneself-speak. H ere are the basic features o f that descrip­ tion. When I speak silently to myself, I do not m ake any sounds go out

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through my m outh. Although I do not m ake sounds through my m outh when I speak silently to m yself, I m ake use o f phonic com plexes, that is, I make use o f the form s o f words or signs o f a natural language. T he use o f natural ph onic form s seem s to imply that my interior m onologue is an actual (not ideal) discourse. Because, however, the m edium o f the voice is tem poral— the phonic form s are iterated across m om ents— the silent vocalization endows the ph on ic form s with ideality (66). Thanks to the phonic form s utilized in hearing-oneseli-speak, one exteriorizes the ideal sense (a th ought). This exteriorization — ex-pression— seem s to imply that we have now m oved from time to space. But, since the sound is heard by the subject during the time he is speaking, what is expressed seem s to be in absolute proxim ity to its speaker, “within the absolute proxim ity o f its presen t” (65), “ absolutely close to m e” (66). T he subject lets him self be affected by the signifier, but apparently without any de­ tour through exteriority or through the world, or, as D errida says, appar­ ently without any detour through “the non-proper in gen eral” (67); the subject seems to hear his oton voice. H earing-oneself-speak seem s to be an absolutely pure auto-affection (68). What m akes hearing-oneself-speak seem to be a pure auto-affection, accordin g to Derrida, is that it seem s to “be nothing other than the absolute reduction o f space in gen eral” (68). T h is ap p are n t absolute red uction o f space in gen eral is why hearing-one self Lspeak is so ap propriate for universality (68). R equiring the intervention o f no surface in the world, the voice is an “absolutely available signifying substan ce” (68). Its transm ission or iteration encoun­ ters no obstacles or limits. The signified or what I want to say seem s to be so close to the signifier that the signifier seem s to be “d iap h an o u s” (69). Yet the diaphaneity o f the voice is only app aren t since, now revert­ ing back to the argum entation found in chapter 5, it is conditioned by tem poralization. Tem poralization in deed m akes the voice ideal, but by doing so it also m akes the voice (the phonic form s) repeatable to infinity and therefore beyond the acts o f expression taking place righ t now. As repeatable, the phonic form s have the possibility o f not being close by. They are able to function as referring to som ething (intuitive content) that is still to com e; they are able to refer to non-presence, which turns the voice into an o p aq u e m urm ur. In oth er words, the ph on ic form s are able to function indicatively— within the silence o f expression. So, even in the auto-affection o f hearing-oneselfLspeak, we find that we are not able to exclude indication, to separate it out from its entanglem ent with expression. T h ese three a rg u m e n ts— the a rgu m e n t from re p re sen tatio n (ch apter 4); the argum en t from tem poralization (ch apter 5); and the argum en t from the m edium o f h earin g-on eselfLspeak (auto-affection)

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(chapter 6 )— operate on the local terrain o f H u sserl’s phenom enology. But they also op erate on the larger terrain of m etaphysics in general. We see this expan sion if we recall th at since P lato ’s Theaetetus (1 8 9 e 190a) thought has always been defin ed as interior m on ologue, as the auto-affection o f h earing-oneselfLspeak. The larger terrain o f m etaphys­ ics is the ultimate transcendental level. Indeed, when H usserl describes the m ovem ent o f tem poralization, he recognizes that he is describing the level from which the sense o f all things and experiences derives. He calls this level “the u n n a m ea b le ” (72 n ote). It is this un nam eable an d ultra-transcendental m ovem ent that D errida (that deconstruction) is at­ tem pting to nam e. D errid a’s conception o f this m ovem ent is indebted to on e p h en om en ological insight: the insight that H usserl discovers in the Fifth Cartesian M editation. Indeed, perhaps all o f D errida’s thought flows from this insight. H usserl brings to light that the experien ce o f others (what he calls “Frem d erfah ru n g,” the experience o f the alien) is always m ediated by a Vergegenwärtigung, a re-presentation, which keeps the interior life o f others necessarily hidden from m e (6). What D errida is d oin g throughout Voice ancl Phenomenon (and perh aps th roughout all o f his writings) is generalizing the sense o f the non-presence o f others to all experience, even to my own and p ro p er interior experience o f myself. For D errida, all auto-affection is in truth hetero-affection. G eneralized Vergegenwärtigung is at the root o f all the new nam es Derrida develops for the ultimate transcendental level, for the m ovem ent of tem poralization: “différan ce,” “trace” (or “writing” ), and “supplem entarity.”-1 Let us see how these nam es evolve out of the m ovem ent of tem ­ poralization. In the living presen t there is a process o f differentiation that produces the phases o f the now, retention, and protention; the process o f differentiation also includes repetition (the retentional phase) that al­ lows fo r an identity to be p rodu ced and recognized. In other words, if we think o f interior m onologue, we see that a difference between h earer and sp eaker is necessary, we see that dialogue comes first. But through that dialogue (the iteration o f the back and forth) the same, a self, is produced (71). And yet the process o f dialogue, differentiation-repetition, never com pletes itself in identity; the m ovem ent continues to go beyond to in­ finity so that identity is always deferred, always a step bey o n d ." “D ifférance” nam es this inseparable m ovem ent (what we called repeatability above) o f differentiation and deferral (75) We can see how “trace” com es about if we focus on the feature o f deferral, repeatability to infinity. T he re­ tentional phase o f the living presen t retains the intuitive presence that has ju st elapsed. It retains, however, not its presence but only the outline o f the presence, as if the retention were a tracing o f it. T he retentional trace then seem s to be a rem ain der from the past, like a trace left behind

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by som e living, but now absent, being. L et us continue with the idea o f deferral to infinity. The trace refers back to this absence, but it continues to com e back and function. The trace really resem bles a memory. Inso­ far as it continues to function as a m em ory does, it also resem bles som e­ thing written (an outline, a drawing, a tracing), and D errida indeed calls the m ovem ent o f tem poralization “archi-writing” (73). The repeatability to infinity o f the retentional trace, which defers the final institution of an identity, is like a book, a book always available for other readers and therefore for other readings. The nam e o f “supplem entarity” evolves out o f the written book always available for other readings. T he “bo ok” seem s to be produced by som eon e who had certain thoughts present to himself, thoughts that he may have externalized in speech to others. But since hum an thought is finite— the auth or and his interlocutors have d ie d — the “b o o k ” refers to that living but now d ead author; it functions as a re­ m inder o f those thoughts that were present in the past. It seems then that the voice that keep s silent (self-present thought) is first, and then we have expression in speech, and then we have speech being written down. In this sequence, it looks as though writing com es third. It seem s as though writ­ ing could never be “archi.” But the truth is that a m ovem ent o f “writing” or “tracin g” comes prior to the voice. As we have already noted in the discussion o f hearing-oneself:speak, the m ovem ent o f tem poralization in truth constitutes ideal m eaning, constitutes presence. We have already spoken o f the originative supplem ent. But now we see that what defines the supplem en t for D errida is a paradoxical structure in which the very m ovem ent that p rod u ces presen ce com es to be seen as derived from that which the m ovem ent makes possible (7 5 -7 6 ). Although writing in the sense o f differentiation-repetition m akes presence possible, writing in the everyday sense (a book) seem s to be derived from the presence o f thought; writing seem s to be a m ere supplem ent. As a supplem ent, writ­ ing is taken back into the terrain o f metaphysics.

Third Structural Feature (and Conclusion): The Two Motivations for Deconstruction The deconstruction enacted in Voice and Phenomenon takes place on four different but interconnected terrains. First, as we have seen, it operates on the terrain o f H u sserl’s phenom enology. D err struction against the “essential distinction” between expression and in­ dication which Husserl m akes within the ambiguity o f the sign. Husserl wants this essential distinction to be radical, a difference o f separation,

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exclusion, and exteriority. H e believes that he finds pure expression in interior m on ologue because, in interior m on ologue, my thoughts seem to be present to me at the very instant that I say them. In other words, H usserl thinks that when I speak to myself, the m eaning o f what I say is im m ediately present to me. D errida shows, however, that H u sserl’s own descriptions o f the experien ce o f time (tem poralization) dem onstrate that in the present as I live it right now there is still and always m edia­ tion and representation. So H u sserl’s argum ents for the im m ediate self­ presence o f expression in interior m on ologue are false. In fact, the living present is contam inated with non-presence, with the non-presence o f the trace. Having dissim ulated this contam ination, phenom enology is there­ fore a form o f “the m etaphysics o f presen ce.” T h e phrase “the m etaphysics o f p rese n ce ” brings us to a seco n d terrain, larger an d deeper, m ore fundam ental than phenom enology: the terrain o f metaphysics. As for H eid egger in Being ancl Time, for D errida in Voice ancl Phenomenon, presence has determ ined the m eaning o f being in the history o f m etaphysics since the ancient G reeks and right up to H u sserl’s phenom enology.24 Presence is defined as that which is available in front o f my look; it is what is proxim ate, the content o f an intuition. But the con ten t o f an intuition is ch an ging and diverse, which m eans that presence m ust also be the perm anence o f a form or idea. It is pos­ sible to conceive the perm an en ce o f the form or idea as otherworldly, in the heavens. Such a conception is Platonism or “degen erate m etaphys­ ics.” Phenom enology, in contrast, conceives form al presence (ideality) as that which is to be lived; as lived, the form does not fall from the sky. H usserlian ph enom enology therefore is a form o f anti-Platonism; it looks to be a way o f exiting m etaphysics. For phenom enology in general, one overcom es m etaphysics only by m ean s o f the unification o f intuition and idea, o f content and form , o f actuality and potentiality, o f subject and substance. But even when ph en om en ology recognizes that the unifica­ tion is indefinitely deferred, it conceives that deferral as a history— the only concept o f history— at the end o f which the unification will occur. W henever presence is not full or im pure, whenever it is threatened with non-presence, presence is posited as a telos. Presence rem ains the princi­ pal and ultimate value. T herefore, even though it tries to change terrain, phenom enology rem ains within the terrain o f metaphysics. T he question o f exitin g m etaphysics brings us to the third ter­ rain on which the Voice ancl Phenomenon deconstruction takes place: the bo rd er o f m etaphysics. Voice ancl Phenomenon puts the system atic soli­ darity o f certain p h en om en ological concepts to the test (85). Phenom ­ enology must be put to the test, because ph en om en ology seems to in­ volve two movem ents. On the one hand, through the concepts o f sense,

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ideality, objectivity, intuition, perception, and expression, ph en om en ol­ ogy seem s to belong to m etaphysics in sofar as m etaphysics constructs a system o f concepts whose “com m on m atrix” is oriented by the value o f presen ce (85). On the oth er hand, ph en om en ology seem s to contest itself fro m within; by m eans o f the con cepts and description s o f tem ­ poralization and alterity (Vergegenwärtigung) , ph enom enology seems also not to belong to m etaphysics. In this secon d m ovem ent o f contestation, phenom enology is a m ovem ent toward the outside o f metaphysics. T he ph en om en ological reduction, m ore precisely, the epochë, opens up the first and p erh ap s only way to exit m etaphysics. T herefore, p h en om en ol­ ogy presents fo r D errida as it did for H eid egger an original kind o f think­ ing, perhaps the first original thinking since Plato and Aristotle. We can see this tension within ph en om en ology by focusing on the b o o k ’s title. The b o o k ’s title— Voice and Phenomenon— reverses the roots o f the word “phenom eno-logy”— logos (voice as the elem en t o f the logos) and phciinomenon (presence as what defines the p h e n o m e n o n ).2’1 T h e reversal means that instead o f the phainomenon o f the logos being valued, now, with deconstruction, the logos o f the phainomenon is valued. But it is not the logos un derstood as the diaphaneity o f the voice. W hat is valued is the logos as the resource o f representation, m ediation, and non-presence, as all the potencies o f repetition. T he p h en om en ological contestation o f m etaphysics brings us to the fourth terrain, which we have n am ed several times already: the out­ side. For D errida who follows what H usserl says explicitly in The Cnsis of European Sciences, the G reek m etaphysical tradition, in which the m ean­ ing o f bein g is defin ed by presen ce, finds its com pletion, 2,000 years later, in ph enom enology (5). It finds its com pletion and its overcom ing. Although it cannot be stressed enough that “the prim ary intention and distant horizon ” o f Voice and Phenomenon does not consist in turning back away from transcendental ph en om en ology (38 note), and that Voice ancl Phenomenon and D errida’s thought in general is a form o f transcenden­ tal philosophy, one must recognize the radicality o f its p roject.26 Like transcendental phenom enology itself, the project o f Voice ancl Phenomenon consists in going back to the roots o f the knowledge o f objects, but it goes back to roots deeper than those found by phenom enology itself, roots be­ yond those foun d in the Greek m etaphysical tradition. It goes back to or beyond to, as we already m entioned, the ultra-transcendental. Although it is D errid a’s central, most im portant book on H u sserl’s philosophy, Voice ancl Phenomenon is m ore than a book about phenom enology and its rela­ tion to m etaphysics. The new names that it invents— “différan ce,” “trace” (or “writing” ), and “supplem entarity”— form a “com m on m atrix” as in m etaphysics, b u t the deconstructive m atrix is not oriented by the value o f

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presence. Not oriented by the value o f presence, this m atrix or terrain, this plan e or land, is not an enclosure. It looks like no p lace that has ever been inhabited before. W hen one en gages in a deconstruction, one is dism antling in the nam e o f this unnam eable p lace.“7 The phrase “in the nam e o f” leads to on e last elaboration. Why should we want to exit the system o f m etaphysics? T here are two motives for D errid a’s deconstruction o f the gen eral system o f m etaphysics (of which H u sserl’s phenom enology, in Voice and Phenomenon, is the specific historical event). First, what m otivates D errida is a concern with truth. We have seen that the belief that presence com es first and its repeti­ tion com es second, that b elief is false. T hat presence com es first is only “a p p aren t” (see 66, where D errida says that the “transcendence [o f the voice] is only ap p are n t” ). T he truth is that there is a necessary struc­ ture that includes within itself o p p o sin g and in separable possibilities and forces (it is the law): event and repetition, proximity and distance. This truth is even the truth o f ph en om en ology (26). Even though the necessary structure— ultra-transcendental, unnam eable, even undeconstructible-8— includes the in-adequation o f the forces o f event and rep­ etition, even though it therefore includes dis-adequation and non-truth, this “fa lse h o o d ” is the truth dissim ulated below the axiom s and prin­ ciples o f Western m etaphysics (and religion [88]) (46 n o te).“9 The second motive for deconstruction is deeply connected to the m otivation o f truth. By m eans o f the argum entation we have seen (espe­ cially the argum entation from the m edium o f hearing-oneself-speak), de­ construction dem onstrates that the self-knowledge o f the “I am” is only apparent. The lack o f cognitive foundation allows deconstruction to un­ make the m etaphysical decision for presence. In other words, it reopens the question o f the m eaning o f being. Or, m ore precisely, decon struc­ tion aims at hearin g the question in a new way, in asking an “unheard-of q uestion ” (8 8 ).30 H earin g the question in an unh eard-of way m akes us recognize that this question has no one absolute answer, that every an­ swer given to it is inadequate, that every answer will find itself op p o sed by another possible answer. H earin g the question in an unheard-of way is supposed to m ake us exit the enclosure and experience the insecurity o f the question. A lthough D errida does not use this word in Voice ancl Phenomenon, the insecurity toward which deconstruction aim s to lead us is the experien ce o f uncleciclabïlïiy?1 For D errida, the experience o f un­ decidability is supposed to m ake us think differently. Thinking differently m eans that w henever an answer to the question has been position ed, thereby closing o ff the question with an object or an objective, it is neces­ sary to open the question back up, to speak out and speak freely (see 76, where D errida refers to “the freedom o f language, the outspokenness o f

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a d iscourse”). In other words, in the face o f the recognition that there is no one absolute answer to the question, wê must seek constantly, end­ lessly, for the right answer. Seeking the right answer, or better, the ju st answer im plies that the experien ce o f undecidability is also supposed to make us live differently. T he experien ce is supposed to call forth a new collectivity, a new people, a new clevios, a new “we.” We must abandon the m etaphysical desire for presen ce and aban don the will to the m astery o f repetition. Because the truth is that repetition com es first and that it com es last (which m eans that there is no unified origin an d that there is no final end), prior to an d beyond presence (which m eans that the first and last word is not “b ein g ” ), because the truth is “the confession o f a m ortal” (47), we m ust— this “m ust” refers to the force of law— let the de­ limitation o f repetition happen, with all its possible yet to com e events. T h e source o f insecurity in truth lies in that we do not know what event is com ing. We m ust risk o u r lives in the face o f contam ination, disease, death, foreignness, and alterity. A bandoning the m etaphysical desire and will, we m ust “value” non-presence (even though the w ord “value” here m akes no sense, since how can one value that about which one does not know?). T herefore we can say that w hat is really at stake in Voice an d Phe­ nomenon is som ething like what Nietzsche called the “transvaluation o f all values.”

Translator's Note

H ere are several points a read er should know abo u t this translation. I have ord ered them roughly accordin g to the o rd er that the reader will encounter them. 1 The n um bers in an gle brackets < > co rresp o n d to the p ag e n um ­ bers o f the French edition o f L a voix et le phénomène (Paris: Presses U niversitaires cle France, 1967). My own interjections in the body o f the translation or in D errid a’s notes are also en closed by angle brackets. 2. D errid a’s notes are placed in footnotes, while my additional notes a p ­ p ear as en dn otes. Many o f the endnotes, as in ch apter 3, fo r instance, provide full citations for quotations which Derricla om itted. 3 . In general, in o rd e r to m ak e the English translation o f L a voix et le phé­ nomène as seam less as possible, I have alm ost always m odified all the ex­ isting English translations citecl. This includes not only the Logical In­ vestigâtions bu t also Frecl K ersten ’s English translation o f H u sserl’s Ideen z u einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie: Erstes Buch, Ja m e s C h urch ill’s English translation o f H u sserl’s Vorlesun­ gen zur Phänomenologie des inner οι 'Zeitbewusstsein, ancl Roy H arris’s trans­ lation o f S au ssu re’s Course in General Linguistics. Even though I have al­ most always m odified ancl som etim es com pletely retranslated (ap propriatin g w ording from the French translations) the quotations from these English translations, I have provided the p age references to the existin g English translation so that the reader will be able to find the equivalent passage ancl the context o f the quotations. 4 . A lm ost im m ediately in the introduction (5), Derricla refers to the o n ­ tological distinctions H usserl m akes in Ideas I (§96-97) between “re al” in the sense o f som eth in g f actual ancl transcenden t to consciousness; “reelle” (here Derr icla uses the French word “réelle”) in the sense o f a part o f consciousness, im m an en t to consciousness; ancl “irreelle” (here Derr icla uses the French word “irréelle”) in the sense o f som eth in g ideal but not factual ancl not a p art o f consciousness, an im m anent transcendence. T h e Kersten English translation renders “reelle” as

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NOTE

“really inh erent” ancl “irreelle” as “really non-inherent.” In ord er clearly to signal these diff erences through ou t the translation, I am ren ­ dering “re al” as “re al” ; “reelle” ancl “réelle” as “reell”; ancl “irreelle” ancl “irréelle” as “irreell.” Derricla has also discussed these ontological differences in his “ ‘G enèse et stru ctu re’ et la p h én om én o lo gie,” in L écriture et la différence, 242-44; “ ‘G enesis ancl Str u ctu re’ ancl Ph en om e­ nology,” in Writing and Difference, 162-64. 5 . If one looks at note 11 in the introduction (fo u n d on 94), one will see that Derr icla says that “each time that we shall cite this translation, we shall indicate this by the signs ‘tr. fr.’ ” He then goes on to say that he has replaced in the French translation the word “significations” by “Bedeu­ tungen.” This com m en t im plies that when Derricla does not use the sign “tr. fr.,” he is not using the available translation ancl instead is translating the Logische Untersuchungen him self into French. The infrequency o f this sign (“tr. fr.”) im plies that throughout Voice and Phenomenon, Derricla is m aking his own French translations o f Logische Untersuchungen. C onse­ quently, I have alm ost always m odified the citations from J. N. Findlay’s English translation o f H u sserl’s Logical Investigations (which itself has been revised by D er m ot M oran) in o rd er to make them m ore consis­ tent with D errid a’s French translation ancl with the available French translation o f the Logische Untersuchungen. I have also used the sign “tr. fr.” in order to indicate the few times when Derricla seem s to be relying on the available French translation o f the Logische Untersuchungen. 6. I have relied on the e a rlie rja m e s Churchill version o f H u sserl’s Phe­ nomenology o f Internal Time-Consciousness since Derr icla relies on the H enri D ussort French translation (Leçons pour une phénoménologie delà conscience intime du temps). The Churchill English translation ancl the D ussort French translation are based on Eclmuncl H usserl, Vorlesungen zw Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbeiuußtseins. T h e H usserlian a volum e o f these lectures ap p ea re d only in 1966: 'ZurPhänomenologie des inneren ,Zeitbewußtsein, 1893-1977, H usserlian a X. I have consulted Jo h n B ro u g h ’s m ore recen t English translation o f H usserlian a X : On the Phe­ nomenology of the Consciousness of Interned Time. 7 . Derr ida’s insertions o f H u sserl’s G erm an ancl D errid a’s interpretative com m ents within H u sserl’s quotes are signaled by square brackets. 8. I am rendering “in stan ce” as “instan ce” or “case” ancl som etim es as “court” (p. 8, for exam ple) or “agen cy ” (13 ancl 60); at other times, where the term seem s m o re idiom atic, I re n d e r it as “in the last anal­ ysis” (5, 9, ancl 61). D errid a’s use o f the term “instance” seems at times to be based on its use in Freudian discourse. In reference to the term “instan ce,” one sh ou ld exam in e the entry on “agen cy ” in Laplan ch e ancl P ontalis’s The Language o f Psychoanalysis. L ap lan ch e ancl

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Pontalis say, “when Freucl introduces the term ‘agen cy’— literally ‘in­ stan ce,’ un d erstood in a sense, as Strachey notes, ‘sim ilar to that in which the word occurs in the phrase “a Court o f the First In­ stan ce” *— he introduces it by analogy with tribunals or authorities which ju d g e what may or may not p ass” (L aplan ch e anci Pontalis, Vocab­ ulaire de Ici psychanalyse, 202; The Language of Psychoanalysis, 16). Der­ rid a’s use o f the term “instan ce” also alludes to that o f L acan in his “L ’instance cle la lettre clans l’inconscient ou la raison depuis F reu d ” (originally p ublished in 1957), since Derricla says, in the 1971 interview “Positions,” that he had read this article p rior to the publication o f his earliest text on Freucl, “Freucl ancl the Scene o f W riting” (originally published in 1966). See Jacq u es Lacan , “L ’instance cle la lettre clans l’inconscient ou la raison depuis Freucl,” in Ecrits, 493-528; “T h e In­ stance o f the Letter in the U nconscious, or R eason Since Freucl, in Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, 412-43. See also D errid a’s long note on Lacan in Positions, 1 12n33; Positions, 107n44. 9 . 1 am ren d erin g “recou vrir” ancl the words b ased on this verb prim arily by m eans o f “co in cid en ce.” So, for instance in the introduction, when Derricla is speaking o f the p arallel relation between p h en om en ological psychology ancl transcendental phenom enology, he speaks o f “ce re­ couvrem ent p arfait,” which I have ren d ered as “this p erfect coinci­ d en ce.” The reader, however, sh ou ld keep in mincl that the French term also m eans to conceal, to cover over, to hide, ancl to overlap with. So one coulcl also say that, in the parallel relation, psychological ex p e­ rience is the concealm en t (recouvrement) o f transcendental experience. Som etim es I have therefore ren d ered “recouvrir” as “to h id e.” 10. Derr icla renders H u sserl’s “A nzeich en” into French as “inclice.” This French word presents a dif ficulty since it m eans both indication ancl in­ dex. C hapter 7 takes up precisely the question o f what an index or inclexical is. So I have generally ren d ered “inclice” into English as “ indi­ cation,” but at times d e p e n d in g on context, I have ren d ered it as “inclexical,” as in ch apter 3 when Derricla is sp eak in g o f the solitude of the self-relation. 11. The variety o f words used to ref er to m ean in g p resen t a com plicated problem , as indicated already in note 4 above. Derricla at tim es u ses “signification” to ren d er H u sse rl’s “B ed eu tu n g.” W hen he is d oin g this, I have u sed the English “signification.” But then he renders “B edeu ­ tun g” by the French “vouloir-clire.” I have ren d ered D errid a’s use o f “vouloir-clire,” when he uses it to translate H u sserl’s “B ed eu tu n g,” by the norm al English ren d erin g o f both the French ancl the G erm an, that is, as “m ean in g .” T h e French title o f ch apter 3 is “Le vouloir-clire com m e so lilo q u e”; the French title o f chapter 4 is “Le vouloir-clire et

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la représen tation .” However, it is im portant to keep in mincl that Der­ rida deliberately renders “B e d e u tu n g” as “vouloir-dire,” since one of his them es in Voice and Phenomenon is voluntarism . The voluntarism or the will is im plied by the French verb “xwuloir dire,” if one stresses the “vouloir” o f the term “vouloir d ire”— alth ough the use o f “vouloir d ire ” in French is equivalent to the English “I m ean ” (“je voulais d ire ” eq u als “I m ean t”) . O f ten, in ord er to indicate that “vouloir d ire ” im­ plies voluntarism , I have inserted the French verb “vouloir dire” in angle brackets. At other times, in the context o f anim ation anci the will, I have rendered it literally as “wanting to say.” I have generally ren­ dered the French “sen s”— which renders the G erm an “S in n ”— in En­ glish as “sen se,” even though both “sens” ancl “Sinn” re fer to m eaning. 12. The read er o f this translation should also keep in mincl the them e of possession, which is an n ou n ced by m eans o f the French word “ap ­ p arten an ce” (here ren d ered as form s o f the verb “to b e lo n g ”) at the close o f the first ch apter (“m arque Γappartenance cle la p h én o m én o lo ­ gie à l ’on tologie classiq u e”: “indicates that p hen om enology belongs to classical on tology”). 13 . The them e o f possession (what is o n e ’s own, what is p ro p er to oneself) continues through the use o f “p ro p re ” (here ren d ered at tim es as “o n e ’s own” ancl at other times as “prop er,” d ep en d in g on context). D en icla uses the French word “p ro p re ” to render H u sserl’s uses o f “ei­ ge n ” (in English, “o n e ’s own” or “p ro p e r”) ancl “Eigen h eit” (“own­ n ess”) as fou n d in his Fifth Cartesian M editation. 14 . Th e them e o f possession is con n ected to the them e o f taking. T h e verb

“prenclre” ancl its past participles a p p e a r frequently. Th e first time a form o f the verb “prenclre” ap p ears in a systematic way is at the encl o f the introduction: “une p rise.” H ere, “lin e p rise ” has been ren d ered as “a grip .” W here it seem s that Derricla is u sin g fo rm s o f prenclre in a sys­ tem atic way (to refer both to the idea o f a belon gin g ancl to contam ina­ tion), I have re n d ered it as a for m o f “g rip .” T h e im portant locations are in the first ch apter ancl at the very encl o f the seventh chapter. T h e re a d er sh ou ld also b ear in mincl that the French verb “co m p ren d re”— related to the French verb “prenclre,” to take— m eans both to u nder­ stand ancl to be in clu ded in. So, at the very encl o f ch apter 7, when Derricla is speaking o f the Teniers painting, he says that “this situation is not co m p reh en d ed [comprise] between intuitions ancl p resen tation s,” m eaning that it is n ot caught between, grasped, taken in ancl included, held betw een these two presences, ancl so it can not be u n d ersto od in terms o f these two presences. Moreover, when Derricla uses the term “reprise,” for exam ple in relation to the idea o f the dialectic at the encl of chapter 5 , 1 have rendered it as “resu m p tion .” This term, however, also has a sense of “taking u p .”

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Fincllay renders “k un d geb en d e Fun ktion ” as “intim ating fun ction .” I am , however, following the French translation, which uses forms o f the word “m an ifestation .” 16 . Fincllay renders the title “Die A usdrücke im einsam en S eelen leb en ” as “E xpression s in Solitary L ife.” Derricla renders it as “L e s expressions clans la vie solitaire cle l’â m e ,” which I have ren d ered here as “E xp res­

15 .

sions in the Solitary Life o f the Sou l.” have rend ered the French “m o tif” as “m otive,” sin ce Derricla u ses the

17.1

term in the sen se o f w hat motivates to action, a reason or a cause for action. T h e term is con n ected to “m otivation,” to “m otor,” ancl to “im ­ p ulse.” The term also has the sense o f “p attern ,” as in the m otif o f a m elody (the recurring figure or them e). 18. As one sees in the con clu din g section o f ch apter 7, the distinction between “en fait” ancl “en droit” is im portant. I have ren d ered this dis­ tinction as “in fact” ancl “in p rin ciple.” The word “clroit,” however, has a ju ridical sense of law or right, as in “the right to exp ression ,” as seen in ch apter 1. have ren d ered “effectivem ent” as “actually,” ancl “en effet” as “actu­ ally,” while ren d erin g “actu ellem en t” som etim es as “currently” ancl

19.1

som etim es as “actually right now.” 20. Derricla m akes use o f a typographical artifice in the word “représen ta­ tion” in ord er to indicate when the term refers to H usserl’s term Verge­ genwärtigung; in this case Derricla inserts a hyphen after the “re”: “re­ présen tation .” The hyphenated version o f the term also translates H u sserl’s Repräsentation. When the term app ears without the hyphen (“represen tatio n ”), it refers to Vorstellung. I have repro du ced this arti­ fice in the English translation. 21. In ch apter 7, when Derricla is speaking o f the relation o f intuition ancl expression in §9 o f the First Logical Investigation, he has ren d ered H u sserl’s G erm an “eventuell” as “éven tuellem en t.” The French transla­ tors o f the Logische Untersuchungen have translated it in the sam e way. Fincllay renders the term as “possibly.” I am ren d erin g it, however, as “contingently,” since both the G erm an ancl the French terms have the sense o f “as it may well turn o u t” or “as it may well h ap p e n .” But on e can see that both the G erm an ancl French term s contain the word “event.” What seems to come ab ou t contingently happens as an event. Moreover, it hap pen s eventually in the sense o f a possibility that was al­ ready there. 2 2 .1 have ren d ered D errid a’s neologism “d ifféran ce,” which h as a doub le m ean in g o f defer ancl differ; by the sam e term. As we see at the b eg in ­ ning o f ch apter 7 ancl in its closing section, the French verb “d iffére r” m eans both to defer ancl to differ. For m ore on this term, see D errid a’s essay “D ifférance,” which is collected in Margins of Philosophy, 1-28.

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23 . 1 have ren d ered the French term “écart” as “h iatus.” This term app ears

frequently through ou t French thought of-the 1960s. 24 . Since Voice and Phenomenon is a book in ontology (the question o f the

m eaning o f bein g as p re se n c e ), it was necessary to be particularly at­ tentive to D errid a’s use o f on tological ter ms. T h ese terms are fre­ quently co m po un ds such as “être-inclice” (20 o f the French) ; “êtrep o u r” (24, 85 o f the F ren ch ); “être-signe” (25 o f the F ren ch ); “être-clevant” (83, 84, 111 o f the F ren ch ); “être-icléal” (84 o f the F ren ch ); “être-originaire” (95 o f the F ren ch ); ancl “être-m ort” (108 o f the F re n ch ). T h ese hyphenated ter ms have been respectively ren d ered as “inclication-being”; “being-for”; “sign-being”; “being-in-front”; “idealbein g”; “originary-being”; ancl “being-cleacl.” 25 . T h e French word “scèn e” ap p ears as early as the introduction (8, there

ren d ered as “scen e,” ancl 14, as “sta g e ”), but it plays alm ost a them atic role in both chapters 6 ancl 7. It h as usually b ee n ren d ered as “scen e” in o rd er to be consistent with D errid a’s co n tem poran eou s essay on Freucl called, in English, “Freucl ancl the Scene o f W riting” (“Freucl et la scène cle l’écritu re”); this essay is collected in Writing and Difference, 196-231. The French word “scèn e,” however, also m eans “sta g e” (ancl by metonymy “theater” ) , which im plies the id ea o f representation, o f a spectacle with several acts ancl o f som eth in g watched or look ed at.

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If we read the word “I” without knowing who wrote it, it is p erh aps not m eaningless, but it is at least foreign to its norm al signification. — H usserl, Logical Investigations A nam e uttered in fron t o f us m akes us think o f the D resden G allery ancl o f ou r last visit there: we w ander through the room s ancl stop before a picture by Teniers which represen ts a picture gallery. Let us su p pose, m oreover, that the pictures in this gal­ lery represen t again pictures which for their part would m ake visible inscriptions that we are able to decipher, etc. — Husserl, Ideas I I have spoken both of “so u n d ” ancl “voice.” I m ean to say that the sound was one o f distinct, o f even wonderfully, thrillingly distinct, syllabifi cation. M. Valclemar spoke, obviously in reply to the question. . . . H e now saicl: “Yes;— no;— I have been sleeping— and now— now— I am dead? — Eclgar Allan Poe, “The Facts in the Case o f M. Valclemar”

Introduction

< l> T h e Logical Investigations (1900-1901) op en ed a path down which, as is well known, all o f p h en om en ology has been pushed. Until the fourth edition (1928), there was no fundam ental shift; nothing was put back into question in a decisive way. Som e things w ere o f course rearranged, an d there was a powerful work o f explanation. Ideas I an d Formal ancl Tran­ scendental Logic unfold, without a break, the concepts o f intentional or noem atic sense, the difference between the two strata o f analytics in the broad sense (pure m orph ology o f ju d gm en ts and consequence-logic), and they remove the deductivist or n om ological restriction that has until now affected the con cept o f science in g e n e r a l/’1 T h e conceptual prem ises o f the Logical Investigations are still at work in The Crisis and the texts associated with it, in particular in “T h e O rigin o f Geom etry,”notably when they con cern all the problem s o f signification and o f lan­ guage in general. In this dom ain m ore than anywhere else, a patient read in g would bring to light in the Logiccd Investigations the germ inal structure o f all o f H u sserl’s thought. On each p age the necessity— or the implicit practice— o f the eidetic and p h en om enological reductions can be read, the detectable presen ce o f all o f that to which the reductions give access. Now the First Logical Investigation (“A usdruck und B edeutu n g” )^ s opens with a chapter devoted to the “essential distinctions” that rigor­ ously order all the later analyses. And the coherence o f this chapter owes everything to a distinction that is proposed in the first paragraph: the word “sign” (Zeichen) would have a “double sen se” (ein Doppelsinn) .4 T he sign “sign” can m ean “exp ressio n ” (Ausdruck) or “indication” (Anzeichen)?

:i: Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, §35b, pp. 103-4. t With the exception of some openings and indispensable anticipations, the present essay analyzes the doctrine o f m eaning such that it is constituted in the First Logical Investiga­ tion. In order to follow better its difficult anci tortuous itinerary, we have generally ab­ stained from comparisons, similarities, or oppositions which here and there seem to con­ front us between the Husserlian theory of meaning and other classical or modern theories of meaning. Each time that we go beyond the text of the First Logical Investigation, we are doing this in order to indicate the principle o f a general interpretation o f Husserl’s thought and in order to sketch a systematic reading that we hope to attempt one day.

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From what question shall we receive and read this distinction, whose stakes ap p ear to be quite high? B efo re p ro p o sin g this purely “p h e n o m e n o lo g ic a l” distin ction between the two senses o f the word “sign” or rather before recognizing the distinction, before raising it up into what intends to be a simple descrip­ tion, Husserl proceeds to a sort o f im plicit p h en om en ological reduction. He puts out o f play all constituted knowledge. He insists on the necessary absence o f presuppositions {Voraussetzungslosigkeit), w hether they com e from metaphysics, from psychology, or from the natural sciences. T h e start­ ing point in the “Faktum ” o f language is not a presupposition as long as we are attentive to the contingency o f the exam ple. The analyses thus car­ ried out keep their “sen se” and their “epistem ological value”— their value in the ord er o f the theory o f knowledge (erkenntnistheoretischen Wert) — whether languages exist or not, whether beings such as hum ans actually make use o f languages or not, whether hum ans or a nature exist really or merely “in the im agination and on the basis o f the m ode o f possibility.”*1 T he m ost general form o f ou r question is thus prescribed. Do not the p h en om en ological necessity, the rigor and the subtlety o f H us­ serl’s analysis, the dem an ds to which it responds and the dem an ds we m ust first o f all satisfy, nevertheless dissim ulate a m etaphysical presu p ­ position? Do they not hide a dogm atic or speculative attachm ent which would, certainly, not restrain the p h en om en ological critique from outside o f itself, which would not be the residue o f an unnoticed naïveté, but w ould constitute ph enom enology from its inside, in its critical project and in the instituting value o f its own prem ises? It would be restrained precisely in what ph en om en ology will recognize soon as the source and the guaran tee o f all value, “the principle o f all prin ciples,” namely, the originary giving evidentness, the present or the presence o f sense in a full and originary intuition. In other words, we are not w ondering whether som e sort o f m etaphysical heritage has been able, here or there, to limit the vigilance o f a phenom enologist. Rather we are w ondering whether the phenomenological form o f this vigilance is not already ordered by m eta­ physics itself. In the lines that we ju st evoked, the m istrust in regard to the m etaphysical presuppositions is given already as the condition o f an authentic “theory o f know ledge,” as if this project o f a theory o f knowl­ edge, even when it has becom e in d ep en d en t from some such speculative system by m eans o f a “critique,” does not belong, from the m om ent it starts up , to the history o f metaphysics. Isn ’t it the case that the idea o f knowledge a n d a theory o f knowledge are m etaphysical in themselves? T h erefore what would be at issue, on the basis o f the privileged exam ple o f the sign, will be to see the ph en o m en ological critique o f metaphysics an noun ce itself as a m om ent within the security that meta-

I N T R O D U C T I O N

physics provides. Better, what would be at issue will be to begin to verify that the resource o f the ph en om en ological critique is the m etaphysical project itself, in its historical com pletion and in the purity o f its origin albeit restored. We have attem pted elsew here to follow the m ovem ent by m eans o f which Husserl, by constantly criticizing m etaphysical speculation, was truly aim in g his critique only at the perversion or the degeneration o f what he continues to think and to want to restore as authentic m eta­ physics or philosophia proieΛ 7 C on cludin g his Cartesian Meditations, H us­ serl still opposes authentic m etaphysics (the one that will owe its achieve­ m ent to phenom enology) to m etaphysics in the usual sense. The results that he presents then are, he writes, m etaphysical, if it is true th at ultim ate knowledge o f b ein g sh o u ld be called metaphysical. On the other hand, what we have here is anything but m etaphysical in the usual sense: a historically degen erate m etaphys­ ics which by no means confor ms to the spirit in which m etaphysics as “first philosophy” was originally instituted. P h en om en ology’s purely intuitive, concrete, ancl also apoclictic m ode o f dem onstration excludes all “m etaphysical adven tu re,” all speculative excess.8

O ne would be able to bring to light the single an d perm an en t motive for all the m istakes and all the perversions that H usserl den oun ces in “d egen erate” metaphysics, across a multiplicity o f dom ains, them es, and argum ents: it is always a blindness in the face o f the authentic m ode o f ideality, o f that which is, which can be repeated indefinitely in the identity o f its presence because o f the very fact that it does not exist, is not reell, is irreell, not in the sense o f fiction, but in an oth er sense which will be able to receive several nam es, whose possibility will allow us to speak o f the n on ­ reality and o f the necessity o f essence, o f the n oem a, o f the intelligible object and o f non-m undanity in gen eral.9 This non-mundanity, not bein g an oth er mundanity, this ideality not being an existent that com es down from the sky, will always have its origin in the possibility o f the repetition o f the act that produces it. So that the possibility o f this repetition can be o p e n idealiter to infinity, it is necessary that on e ideal form secures this unity o f the indefinitely and the idealiter: this is the present, o r rather the presence o f the living present. T he ultim ate form o f ideality, the one in which in the last analysis we can anticipate o r recall all repetition, the

* Jacq u e s Derricla, “La phénom énologie et la clôture cle la métaphysique,” in ΕΠΟΧΕΣ, Athens, February 1966.

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ideality o f ideality is the living present, the self:presence o f transcendental life. Presence has always been and will always-be, to infinity, the form in which— we can say this apodictically— the infinite diversity o f contents will be produ ced. The o p p o sitio n — the inaugural opposition o f m eta­ physics— between form and matter, finds in the concrete ideality o f the living present its ultim ate and radical justification. We shall com e upon the enigm a o f the concept o f life in the expressions “the living presen t” and “transcendental life” again. Let us note, however, in order to specify our intention here, that p h en om en ology appears to us to be torm ented if not contested, from the inside, by m eans o f its own descriptions o f the m ovem ent o f tem poralization and o f the constitution o f intersubjectivity. At the greatest depth o f what connects these two decisive m om ents o f the description together, one sees an irreducible non-presence recognized as a constituting value, and with it a non-life or a non-presence o f the living present, a non-belonging o f the living present to itself, a non-originarity that cannot be eradicated. T he nam es that it receives only m ake its resis­ tance to the form o f presence m ore vivid; in two words, what is at issue is: (1) the necessary passage from retention to re-presentation (Vergegenwär­ tigung) in the constitution o f the presence o f a tem poral object (Gegen­ stand) whose identity can be repeated; (2) the necessary passage through appresentation in the relation to the alter ego, that is, in the relation to what also m akes possible an ideal objectivity in general, intersubjectivity being the condition o f objectivity and this objectivity being absolute only in the case o f ideal objects. In the two cases, what is nam ed as a m odification o f presentation (representation and «/^presentation) ( Vergegenwärtigung or Appräsenlation) does not supervene upon presentation, but conditions it by fissuring it a priori. T hat does not call into question the apodicticity o f the ph enom enological-transcendental description. It does not cut into the fo u n d in g value o f presence. This expression, m oreover, “the foun din g value o f p resen ce,” is a pleonastic expression. What is at issue, however, is to m ake the original and non-em pirical space o f non­ foundation appear, as the irreducible em ptiness from which the security o f presen ce in the m etaphysical fo rm o f ideality is decided and from which this security removes itself. It is within this horizon that we are here interrogating the ph en om en ological con cept o f the sign. The concept of metaphysics with which we are working will have to be determ ined, and the generality o f this question, which is too large, m ust be narrow ed here. In the case in point, we are narrowing down the question to this: how to justify first o f all the decision which subordinates a reflection on the sign to a logic? And if the concept o f sign precedes logical reflection, is given to logic, is delivered to its critique, from where does the concept o f the sign come? W here does the essence o f the sign,

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in relation to which this con cept is regulated, com e from? What grants authority to a theory o f know ledge in order to determ ine the essence and origin o f language? Such a decision, we do not attribute it to Husserl; he takes it u p explicitly, o r rather, he takes u p explicitly its heritage and validity. T he consequences o f this are limitless. On the one hand, Husserl has had to defer, from one end o f his itinerary to another, every explicit m editation on the essence o f language in general He puts the m editation on the essence o f language in general “out o f play” in Formal and Tran­ scendental Logic.10 And, as Fink has indeed shown, H usserl never posed the question o f the transcendental logos, o f the inherited lan guage in which phenom enology produces an d exhibits the results o f the workings o f the reduction. T he unity between ordinary language (or the language o f traditional metaphysics) and the lan guage o f ph enom enology is never broken despite all the precautions, quotation m arks, renovations and in­ novations. The transform ation o f a traditional concept into an indicative or m etaphorical con cept does not absolve the heritage; it im poses ques­ tions which Husserl has never attem pted to answer. This is due to the fact that, on the other hand, by bein g interested in language only within the horizon o f rationality, by determ ining the logos on the basis o f logic, H us­ serl has in fact, and in a traditional way, determ in ed the essence o f lan­ guage by starting from logicity as the norm alcy o f its telos. What we would like to suggest here is that this telos is the telos o f being as presence. T h u s , fo r e x a m p le , w h en w h at is a t issu e is t h e re d e fin itio n o f th e r e la tio n b e tw e e n p u r e g r a m m a r a n d p u r e lo g ic (a r e la tio n th a t tr a d i­ tio n a l lo g ic w o u ld h a v e m iss e d , sin c e it w as p e r v e r t e d by m e ta p h y s ic a l p r e s u p p o s it io n s ) , w h en w h a t is a t is s u e t h e r e fo r e is th e c o n s titu tio n o f a p u r e m o r p h o lo g y o f Bedeutungen (w e a r e n o t tr a n s la tin g th is w o rd f o r r e a s o n s th at will a p p e a r in a m o m e n t ) , th e r e - a p p r e h e n s io n o f p u r e g ra m m a tic a lity , th e sy stem o f ru le s th a t a llo w u s to r e c o g n iz e w h e th e r a d is c o u r s e in g e n e r a l is re a lly a d is c o u r s e — if it m a k e s sense o r i f f a ls e h o o d o r th e a b su rd ity o f c o n t r a d ic t io n ( Widersinnigkeit) d o n o t m a k e it in c o m ­ p r e h e n s ib le a n d d o n o t d e p r iv e it o f the q u a lity o f m e a n in g fu l d is c o u r s e , d o n o t r e n d e r it sinnlos— th e n th e p u r e g e n e r a lity o f this m e ta - e m p ir ic a l g r a m m a r d o e s n o t c o v e r th e w h o le fie ld o f th e p o ssib ility o f la n g u a g e in g e n e r a l; it d o e s n o t e x h a u s t th e w h o le e x t e n t o f th e a priori o f la n g u a g e . T h e p u r e g e n e ra lity o f th e m e ta - e m p ir ic a l g r a m m a r c o n c e r n s o n ly th e

logical apiiori o f la n g u a g e ; it is pure logical grammar. T h is r e s tr ic tio n is f u n c ­ tio n in g fr o m th e b e g in n in g , a lth o u g h H u sse r l d id n o t stre ss it in th e first e d itio n o f th e Logical Investigations: In the First Edition, I spoke o f “pure gram m ar,” a nam e conceived ancl explicitly clevisecl as b ein g an alo go u s to K an t’s “pure science o f n atu re.”

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But to the extent that it cannot, however, be asserted that the pure m orph ology o f Bedeutungen takes in the en tire gram m atical a priori in its universality— since fo r exam p le the com m unicative relations betw een psychical subjects, so im portant for the gram m ar, involve their own a priori, the expression “pure logical gram m ar” is pref erab le .11

Carving out the logical a priori within the gen eral a priori o f lan­ guage does not extract a region. As we are going to see, it designates the dignity o f a telos, the purity o f a norm , and the essence o f a destination. By locating in the First Logical Investigation the roots that H u sserl’s later discourse will never disturb, we would like to show here therefore that the m ovem ent in which the whole o f ph enom enology is already en­ gaged repeats the original intention o f m etaphysics itself. The value o f presence (in the two connected senses o f the proxim ity o f what is set out as an object o f an intuition and the proxim ity o f the tem poral present which gives its form to the clear an d actual intuition o f the object), the last court o f appeal fo r this whole discourse, m odifies itself, without its being lost, every time what is at issue is the presence o f any object what­ soever to consciousness in the clear evidence o f a fulfilled intuition or when what is at issue is self-presence in consciousness— “con sciousness” m eaning nothing other than the possibility o f the self-presence o f the present in the living p resen t.12 Each time that this value o f presence is threatened, H usserl will awaken it, will recall it, will m ake it return to itself in the fo rm o f the telos, that is, in the form o f the Idea in the Kant­ ian sense. T h ere is no ideality unless an Idea in the Kantian sense is at work, op en in g the possibility o f an indefinite, the infinity o f a prescribed progress, or the infinity o f perm itted repetitions. This ideality is the very form in which the presence o f an object in general can be indefinitely repeated as the same. T he non-reality o f the Bedeutung, the non-reality o f the ideal object, the non-reality o f the inclusion o f the sense or o f the noem a in consciousness (H usserl will say that the noem a does not belon g in a reell m an n er— yeell— to consciousness) will provide therefore the security that the presen ce to consciousness will be able to be repeated indefinitely: ideal presence to an ideal or transcendental consciousness. Ideality is the salvation or the m astery o f presence in repetition. In its purity, this presence is the presence of nothing that exists in the world; it is in correlation with acts o f repetition which are themselves ideal. Is this to say that what op en s the repetition to infinity or what is open ed in repetition when the m ovem ent o f idealization is secu red is a certain relation o f an “existent” to his death? Is this to say that “transcendental life” is the scene o f this relation? It is too early to say that. First, it is necessary to pass through the problem o f language. We shall not be

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surprised to discover that lan guage is really the m edium o f this play o f presence and absence. Is it not in language, is not language first o f all the very thing in which life and ideality could seem to be united? Now, we must consider on the one hand that the elem ent o f signification— or the substance o f expression — which seem s best to preserve at once ideality and living presence in all o f its form s, is living speech, the spirituality o f the breath as phone. On the other hand, we m ust consider that ph en om ­ enology, the m etaphysics o f presen ce in the form o f ideality, is also a philosophy o f life. It is a philosophy of life not only because, in its center, death is recognized as having n othin g but an em pirical and extrinsic significa­ tion, the signification o f m un dan e accident, but also because the source o f sense in general is always determ ined as the act o f a thing that lives, as the act of a living being, as Lebendigkeit. Now the unity o f living, the hearth fire o f the Lebendigkeit which diffracts its light into all the fu n da­ m ental concepts o f ph en om en ology (Leben, Erlebnis, lebendige Gegenwart, Geistigkeit, etc.), escapes the transcendental reduction, and as the unity o f m undane life and transcendental life, blazes open even the passage for the red uction .13 When em pirical life or even the pure region o f the psychical are bracketed, what H usserl discovers is still a transcendental life or in the last analysis the transcendentality o f a living p resen t— and Husserl thematizes it without so m uch as posing the question o f this unity o f the concept o f life. “C onsciousness without a sou l” (seelenloses) , whose essential possibility is presen ted in Ideas I (§54), is still a living transcen­ dental consciousness. If we conclude, with a gesture that is in fact very Husserlian in its style, that the concepts o f em pirical life (or in general m u n d an e life) and transcendental life are radically h eterogen eous and that a purely indicative or m etaph orical relation is g o in g on between the two nam es, then the possibility o f this relation bears the entire weight o f the question. The com m on root that m akes all o f these m eta­ phors possible appears to us to still be the concept of lif e. In the last anal­ ysis, between the pure psychical— a region o f the world that is op p o sed to tran scen den tal consciousness and is discovered by m eans o f the re­ duction o f the totality o f the natural, transcendent world— and the pure transcendental life, there is, H usserl says, a relation o f parallelism. Phenom enological psychology will in fact have to rem ind any work­ ing psychology o f its backgroun d o f eidetic presuppositions and the con­ ditions o f its own language. It will be incum bent on ph enom en ological psychology to settle the sense o f the concepts o f psychology, and first o f all the sense o f what we call the psyché. But what is going to allow us to distinguish this ph en om en ological psychology, which is an eidetic and a priori, descriptive science, from transcendental phenom enology itself ?

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What is going to allow us to distinguish the epochë which discovers the im­ m anent dom ain o f the purely psychical from .the transcendental epochë itself? For the field o p en ed by this pure psychology has a privilege in regard to the oth er regions, and its generality dom inates all oth er re­ gions. All lived-experiences arise from it necessarily and the sense o f every region or of every determ inate object is announced by way o f this pure psychology. Thus too the depen den ce o f the purely psychical in regard to transcendental consciousness, which is the archi-region, is absolutely singular. The dom ain o f pure psychological experience in fact coincides with the totality o f the dom ain o f what H usserl calls transcendental ex* perience. And yet, despite this p erfect coincidence, a radical difference rem ains, which has nothing in com m on with any other difference. T his is a difference which in fact distinguishes nothing, a difference which sepa­ rates no being, no lived-experience, no determ inate signification. This is a difference however which, without altering anything, changes all the signs, and it is a difference in which alone the possibility o f a transcen­ dental question holds, that is, the possibility o f freedom itself. This is, therefore, the fundam ental difference without which no other difference in the world would m ake sense or even have a chance o f appearin g as such. W ithout the possibility and without the recognition o f such a doubling (Verdoppelung) , whose rigor will tolerate no duplicity, without this invisible distance stretched between the two acts o f the epochë, transcen­ dental phenom enology would be destroyed at its root. The difficulty is based on the fact that this doubling o f sense m ust not correspon d to any ontological double. For exam ple, and briefly put, my transcendental I14 is radically different, Husserl explicitly states, from my natural and hum an I.13 A nd yet, the transcendental I is distinguished from the natural and h um an I by nothing, by nothing that m ight be determ ined by the natural sense o f distinction. The (transcendental) I is not an other. It is especially not the m etaphysical or form al phantom o f the em pirical self.16 This is what would lead to denouncing the idea that the absolute spectator I is the theoretical im age and m etaph or o f its literal psychical self; as well this m ean s denoun cin g every analogical lan guage o f which we m ust at times m ake use in order to announce the transcendental reduction an d in order to describe this unheard-of “ob ject” which is the psychical self over against the absolute transcendental ego. Truly, no lan gu age is equal to this operation by which the transcendental ego constitutes and o p ­ poses its own m undane self, that is, opposes its soul, by reflecting itself in a verweltlichende Selbstapperzeption. '" {‘ The pure soul is this strange self-

Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §45.

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objectivation (Selbstobjektivierung) o f the m onad by and in itself."'18 There also the Soul proceeds from the One (the m onadic ego) and can freely turn itself back toward the m onadic ego in a R eduction. All o f these difficulties are concentrated in the enigm atic concept o f “p arallelism .” H usserl evokes the astonishing, adm irable “parallel n ature” and even “the coincidence, if we m ay put it this way,” o f p h e ­ n om enological psychology and transcendental phenom enology, “both un d erstood as eidetic d isciplin es.”ΐ “T he one inhabits the other, so to speak, implicitly.” This nothing that distinguishes the parallels, this nothing without which no explication, that is, no language, would be able to develop freely in the truth without being distorted by som e real m i­ lieu, this nothing without which no transcendental, that is, philosophical, question would be able to take a breath, this nothing arises, if we can say this, when the totality o f the world is neutralized in its existence and reduced to its phen om en on . This operation is that of the transcendental reduc­ tion; in any case, it cannot be that of the psycho-phenomenological reduction. T he pure eidetics o f psychical lived-experience concerns, undoubtedly, no determ inate existence, no em pirical factuality; it calls fo r no signification that is transcendent to consciousness. But the essences that it settles in­ trinsically presuppose the existence o f the world in that kind o f m undane region called the psyche. Moreover, we m ust notice that this parallelism does m ore than release the transcendental ether. What it does is m ake m ore mysterious still (and it alone is capable o f doin g this) the sense o f the psychical and o f psychical life, that is, it m akes m ore mysterious the sense o f a munclanity that is capable o f bearing and in som e way nurtur­ ing transcenclentality, having a dom ain equal in extent to transcendentality without, however, m ergin g with the transcendental in some total ad­ equation. To conclude from this parallelism with an adequation is the m ost tem pting, the m ost subtle but also the m ost obscurin g o f confusions: transcendental psychologism. A gainst this, it is necessary to m aintain the precarious an d threatened distance between the parallels; against tran­ scendental psychologism it is necessary to question constantly. Now, since transcendental consciousness is not im paired in its sense by the hypoth­ esis o f a destruction o f the world (Ideas I, §49), “it is certain that we can think a consciousness without a body and, as paradoxical as it may seem , without a soul [seelenloses\.”19 And yet, transcendental con sciousn ess is nothing more or other than psychological consciousness. T ranscen den tal psychologism does not un d erstan d that. It does not u n derstan d

* Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §57. t Husserl, Phänomenologishe Psychologie, p. 343

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that if the world needs a supplement of soul, the soul, which is in the world, needs this supplementary nothing that is the transcendental and without which no world would appear. If we are attentive to H u sserl’s renewal of the notion o f the “transcendental,” then we m ust do the opposite o f transcendental psychologism and guard against endowing this distance with som e sort o f reality. We m ust not substantialize this inconsistency or turn it into, perhaps by sim ple analogy, som e thing or som e factor o f the world. This would be to freeze the light at its source. If language never escapes from analogy, even if it is analogy through and through, it must, having reached this point, and at this very point, freely take up its own destruction and cast m etaphors against m etaphors. This is to obey the most traditional o f im peratives, an im perative that has received its m ost explicit (but not the m ost original) form in the Enneacls, an im perative that has never stopped being faithfully transm itted all the way down to the Introduction to Metaphysics (especially that o f B ergso n ). This war o f language against itself is the price that we have to pay in order to think sense and the question o f the origin o f sense. We see that this war is not one war am ong many. A s a polem ic for the possibility o f sen se an d o f the world, this war takes place in this difference, which, as we have seen, cannot inhabit the world, but only language, in its transcendental restlessness. In truth, far from merely inhabiting language, this difference is also its ori­ gin and its abode. Lan guage keeps watch over the difference that keeps watch over language. Later, in his Nachwort zu meinen Ideen (1930) and in the Cartesian Meditations (§14 and 57), H usserl will evoke again, and briefly, this “p re­ cise parallelism ” between “the pure psychology o f con sciousn ess” and “the tran scen den tal p h en om en ology o f co n sciou sn ess.”^ And he will then say, in ord er to im pugn transcendental psychologism which “m akes an authentic philosophy im possible” (Cartesian Meditations, §14), we have to practice at all costs the “N uan cierun g” which distinguishes the paral­ lels, one o f which is in the world and the other is outside o f the world without being in anoth er world, that is, without stopping to be, like every parallel, alongside and right next to the other:21 At all costs, it is neces­ sary to collect and shelter in our discourse these subtle (geringfügigen) , frivolous, “seem ingly trivial n uan ces” that “decisively decide the paths and the detours [Wege unci Abwege] o f philosophy” (Cartesian Meditations, §14). Our discourse must shelter these nuances within itself and at once thereby in them re-secure its possibility ancl its rigor: But the strange unity o f these two parallels, what relates the one to the other, does not let itself be distributed by the parallels, and by dividing itself finally welds the transcendental to its other: this strange unity is life. One sees in fact very quickly that the sole kernel o f the con cept o f psyche is life as self-relation,

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w hether the relation is p ro d u ced or not in the form o f consciousness. “Living” is therefore the nam e of what precedes the reduction and es­ capes finally from all the distributions that the reduction brings to light. Life, however, is its own distribution and its own opposition to its other. By determ ining “living” in this way, we ju st therefore nam ed the resource o f the insecurity o f discourse, the point at which precisely it can no lon­ ger re-secure its possibility ancl its rigor in the nuance. This concept o f life is then g rasp ed in an agency which is no lon ger that o f pre-transcendental naïveté, in the lan guage o f everyday life or in the lan gu age o f biologi­ cal science. But if this ultra-transcendental con cept o f life allows us to think life (in the everyday sense or in the sense o f biology) and if it has never been inscribed in any language, this concept o f life perhaps calls for another name. We will be less astonished confronting the effort o f ph en om en ol­ ogy— an effort that is laborious and oblique, even tenacious— to keep watch over speech, in ord er to assert an essential link between the lo­ gos and the phone, since the privilege o f consciousness (about which H usserl fundam entally never w ondered what consciousness is, despite all the adm irable, interm inable and in many regards revolutionary m edi­ tations that he devoted to it) is only the possibility of the living voice. Since self:consciousness ap p ears only in its relation to an object whose presence it can keep watch over and repeat, self-consciousness is never perfectly foreign or p rior to the possibility o f language. As we shall see, H usserl doubtlessly wanted to m aintain an originarily silent, “preexpressive” layer o f lived-experience. But since the possibility of consti­ tuting ideal objects belongs to the essence o f consciousness, and since these ideal objects are historical products, which appear only thanks to acts o f creation or o f intention, the elem ent o f consciousness and the elem ent o f language will be m ore and m ore difficult to discern. Now, is it not the case that their indiscernability will introduce non-presence and difference (mediacy, the sign, referral, etc.) righ t into the heart o f self­ presence? This difficulty calls for a response. This response is called the voice. The enigm a o f the voice is rich and profo u n d because o f all the things to which it seem s to be responding. T hat the voice sim ulates the “keeping watch” over presence and that the history o f spoken language is the archive o f this sim ulation from now on prevents us from considering the “difficulty” to which the voice responds, in H u sserl’s ph en o m en ol­ ogy, either as a systematic difficulty or as a contradiction that would be specific to his phenom enology. That as well prevents us from describing this sim ulation, whose structure involves an infinite complexity, as an il­ lusion, a phantasm , or a hallucination. T h ese last concepts in fact refer to the sim ulation o f lan guage as to their comm on root.

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This “difficulty” structures H u sserl’s whole discourse, and we m ust recognize the work it d oes. By exploitin g all-of its resources with the greatest critical refinem ent, H usserl will radicalize the necessary privilege o f the phonê which is im plied by the entire history o f m etaphysics. For Husserl will not recognize an originative affinity with the logos in general in the sonorous substance or in the physical voice, or in the body o f the voice in the world; rather the originative affinity will be recogn ized in the p h en om en ological voice, in the voice in its transcendental flesh, in the breath, in intentional anim ation which transform s the body o f the word into flesh, which turns the Körper into Leib, a geistige Leiblichkeit. The ph en om en ological voice would be this spiritual flesh which continues to speak and to be present to itself— to hear itself-—in the absence o f the world. O f course, what we grant to the voice is gran ted to the lan guage o f words, to a language constituted fro m unities— which we could believe ir­ reducible and in d ecom p o sable— welding the signified con cept onto the signifying “phonic co m p lex.” D espite the vigilance o f the description, a perhaps naive treatm ent o f the con cept o f “word” has no d ou bt failed to resolve in phenom enology the tension between its two m ajor motives: the purity o f form alism and the radicality o f intuitionism . T hat the privilege o f presen ce as consciousness can be established— that is, can be constituted historically as well as dem on strated— only by m eans o f the excellence o f the voice is a claim whose obviousness has never held center stage in phenom enology. A ccording to a m ode that is neither simply operative nor directly them atic, in a place that is neither central nor lateral, the necessity o f this claim ’s obviousness seem s to have secured a sort o f “grip” on all phenom enology.““ The nature o f this “grip” is badly conceived in the concepts usually devoted to the philosophy o f the history o f philosophy. But ou r p urp ose here is not to m editate di­ rectly on the form o f this “g rip .” Our p urp ose is m erely to show it as already at work— and powerfully— from the very beginning o f the First Logical Investigation.

Sign and Signs

H usserl begins by poin tin g out a confusion. Within the word “sign ” (Zeichen), always in ordinary lan guage and at times in philosophical lan­ guage, are h idden two h eterogen eous concepts: that o f expression (Aus­ druck) , which we often mistakenly hold as being the synonym of the sign in general, and that o f indication (Anzeichen). Now, according to Husserl, there are som e signs that express nothing because these signs carry— we must still say this in G erm an — nothing that we can call Bedeutung or Sinn. This is what indication is. Certainly, indication is a sign, like expression. But it is different from expression because it is, insofar as it is an indica­ tion, deprived o f Bedeutung or Sinn: bedeutunglos, sinnlos. Nevertheless it is not a sign without signification. Essentially, there cann ot be a sign with­ out signification, a signifier without a signified. This is why the traditional translation o f Bedeutung by “signification,” although it is established and nearly inevitable, risks blu rrin g H u sserl’s entire text, ren derin g it un­ intelligible in its axial intention, and consequently renderin g unintel­ ligible all o f what will dep en d on these first “essential distinctions.” O ne can say with H usserl in G erm an, without absurdity, that a sign (Zeichen) is deprived o f Bedeutung (is bedeutungslos, is not bedeutsam), but one can­ not say in French, without con tradiction , that un signe is deprived o f signification.1 In G erm an on e can speak o f expression (Ausdruck) as a be­ deutsame Zeichen, which H usserl does. O ne cannot, without redundancy, translate bedeutsame Zeichen into French as signe signifiant, which lets us im agine, against the evidence and against H u sserl’s intention, that we could have clés signes non signifiants. While being suspicious o f the estab­ lished French translations, we m ust nevertheless confess that it will always be difficult to replace them . T his is why our rem arks are nothing less than criticisms aim ed at the existing, valuable translations. We shall try nevertheless to p ropose som e solutions which will keep to being halfway between com m entary and translation. They will thus be valid only within the limits o f H u sserl’s texts. Most often, when we are confronting a diffi­ culty, we shall, according to a procedu re whose value is at times contestable, retain the G erm an word while attem pting to clarify it by m eans of the analysis. In this way, it will be very quickly confirm ed that, for Husserl, the expressivity o f the e xp ressio n — which always assum es the ideality o f a

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Bedeutung— has an irreducible link to the possibility o f spoken discourse {Rede). Expression is a purely linguistic sign and, in the first analysis, this is precisely what distinguishes it from indication. Although spoken dis­ course is a very com plex structure, involving always, in fact, an indicative layer which, as we shall see, we shall have the greatest trouble trying to hold within its limits, H usserl reserves for it the exclusivity o f the right to expression and therefore the exclusivity o f pure logicity.“ W ithout violat­ ing H u sserl’s intention, on e could define, if not translate, “b ed eu ten ” by “vouloir-dire” at once in the sense o f a speaking subject that wants to say, “expressin g him self,” as H usserl says, “abo u t som eth ing”— and in the sense o f an expression that means.'"'3 We can then be assured that the Be­ deutung is always what som eone or a discourse means : always a sense o f discourse, a discursive content. In contrast to Frege, Husserl, as we know, does not distinguish, in the Logical Investigations, between Sinn and Bedeutung: Besides, for us, Bedeutung m eans the sam e thing as Sinn [gilt cils gleichbedeutend mit Sinn]. On the one hand, it is very convenient, espe­ cially in the case o f this concept, to have at o n e ’s disposal parallel, inter­ ch angeable terms, particularly since the sense o f the term Bedeutung is itself to be investigated. A furth er consideration is our ingrain ed habit to use the two words as m ean in g the sam e thing. In these conditions, it seem s a rather dubious step if their Bedeutungen axe differentiated, ancl if (as G. Frege has p ro p o sed ) we use one for Bedeutung in ou r sense, ancl the other for the objects e x p re sse d .1

In Ideas I, the dissociation that intervenes between the two terms does not at all have the sam e function as in Frege, and it confirm s our reading: Bedeutung is reserved for the ideal sense content o f verbal expression, o f spoken discourse, while sense {Sinn) covers the whole noem atic sphere, including its non-expressive stratum: We b egin with the fam iliar distinction between the sensuous, so to speak, corporeal side o f expression, ancl its non-sensuous o r “spiritual” side. We need not enter into a closer exam in ation o f the first side; likewise, we need not con sid er the m an n er o f unifying b oth sides. Obvi­ ously, they too designate headings for not u nim portant p h en o m e n o ­ logical problem s. We shall restrict our regard exclusively to “signifying”

* “To m ean,” “meaning” are goocl equivalents for “bedeuten,” “Bedeutung,” which we clo not have in French.

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[bedeuten] ancl “B e d e u tu n g .” Originally, these words concern ed only the linguistic sphere [sprachliche Sphäre], that o f “exp ressin g” [des Aiisdrlich­ ens]. But one can scarcely avoid ancl, at the sam e time, take an im por­ tant cognitive step, exten d in g the Bedeutung o f these words ancl suitably m odifying them so that they can find application o f a certain kind to the whole noetico-noem atic sphere: thus application to all acts, be they now interwoven [verflochten] with expressive acts or not. Thus we have continued to speak o f “sense” [Si?z?z] in the case o f all intentional lived-experience— a w ord which is u sed in general as an equivalent to Bedeutung. For the sake o f distinctness we shall p refer the ter m Bedeutung for the old concept, ancl, in particular, in the com plex locu­ tion o f “logical Bedeutung” or “expressive B e d e u tu n g We shall continue to use the w ord “se n se ” as before in the m ost all-inclusive ran ge.’’

After having asserted, in a passage to which we shall have to return, that there exists a pre-expressive stratum o f lived-experience or sense, and then that this stratum o f sense could always receive expression and Bedeu­ tung, H usserl proposes that “logical Bedeutung \s an expression .”6 The differen ce between indication and expression app ears very quickly, over the course o f the description, as a difference that is m ore functioned than substantial. Indication and expression are functions or signifying relations and not terms. One and the sam e phenom enon can be ap p reh en d ed as expression or as indication, as a discursive sign or as a non-discursive sign. T hat depen ds on the intentional lived-experience that anim ates it. T he functional character o f the description im m ediately shows the extent o f the difficulty and gets us right to its center. Two func­ tions can be interwoven or entangled in the sam e concatenation o f signs, in the sam e signification. Husserl speaks first o f the addition or o f the ju xtap osition o f one function with the other: “. . . signs in the sense o f indication [Anzeichen] (notes, m arks, etc.) do not express, unless they fulfill, in addition to [H u sserl’s em phasis, neben, “b esid es”] the indicative func­ tion, a function o f Bedeutung.”7 But a few lines later, he will speak o f inti­ m ate intrication, o f entanglem en t (Verflechtung). This word will reappear often, at decisive m om ents, and this will not be by chance. It appears al­ ready in the first section: “M eaning [bedeuten ]— in com m u­ nicative discourse [in mitteilenderRecle]— is always interwoven [verflochten] in a relation with this indication-being.”8 We therefore already know that, in fact, the discursive sign and con ­ sequently the m eaning is always entangled, gripped within an indicative system. T he expressive and logical purity o f the Bedeu­ tung that H usserl wants to grasp as the possibility o f the Logos is gripped, that is, con tam in ated— in fact and always (allzeit verflochten ist) insofar as

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the Bedeutung is gripped within a com m unicative discourse. O f course, as we shall see, com m unication itself is for H usserl a stratum that is extrinsic to expression. But each time that an expression is produced in fact, it car­ ries a com m unicative value, even if the expression does not exhaust itself in com m unication or if this value is simply associated with it. It will be necessary to specify the m odalities o f this interweaving. But it is clear from now on that this factual necessity o f entanglem en t which intimately associates expression and indication m ust not, in H us­ serl’s eyes, underm ine the possibility o f a rigorous essential distinction. T his possibility is purely ju rid ic al and ph en o m en ological. T he whole analysis will m ove forward th erefore in this hiatus between fact and right, existence and essence, reality and the intentional function. By in deed leapin g over the m ediations and by reversing the ap p aren t order, we would be tem pted to say that this hiatus, which defines the very space o f phenom enology, does not preexist the question o f language, and it is not inserted into phenom enology as within one dom ain or as one prob­ lem am on g others. It is op en ed up, on the contrary, only in and by the possibility o f language. And its ju rid ical value, the right to a distinction between fact and intentional right, depen ds entirely on lan guage and, in lan guage, on the validity o f a radical distinction between indication and expression. L et us pursue our reading. Every expression would therefore be gripped, despite itself, by an indicative process. But the opposite, H us­ serl recognizes, is not true. We might therefore be tem pted to turn the expressive sign into a species o f the genus “indication.” In this case, we would have to say in the end that speech, whatever the dignity or what­ ever the originality we still grant it, is only a form o f gesture. In its es* sential center and not only by m eans o f what H usserl con siders as its accidents (its physical side, its com m unicative fu nction ), speech belongs, without exceedin g it, to the gen eral system o f signification. This system would be m erged with the system o f indication. This is precisely what H usserl contests. In order to do that, he must th erefore dem onstrate that expression is not a species o f indication even though all expressions are m ixed with indication, the reverse not being true. H usserl writes, I f o n e limits on eself to expression s em ployed in living colloquy, a s one usually cloes involuntar ily when expr ession is in question, the co n cept o f an indication seem s to apply mor e widely than that o f an expr ession, but this cloes not m ean that its content is the gen u s o f which an exp res­ sion is the species. To mean [bedeuten ] is not a particular species of sign-being [Zßichenseins] in the sense of indication [Anzeige]. It has a

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narrow er application only because m eaning [bedeuten]— in com m unica­ tive discou rse— is always en tan gled [verflochten] with inclication-being [Anzeichensein] , ancl this in its turn leads to a wider concept, since m ean­ ing is also capable o f occurring outside o f this en tan glem en t/ ’9

In order to dem onstrate the rupture o f the species-genus relation, we then have to rediscover, if there is any, a ph en om en ological situa­ tion in which expression is no longer tied up in this entanglem ent, is no longer interwoven with indication. Since this contam ination is always produ ced in real colloquy (at once because in real colloquy expression indicates a con tent that is forever h idden from intuition, namely, the lived-experience o f the other, and because the ideal content o f the Be­ deutung and the spiritual side o f the expression are united in real collo­ quy with the sensible side), it is in a language without com m unication, in a m onological discourse, in the absolutely lowest register o f the voice o f the “solitary life of the soul” (in einem Seelenleben) that it is necessary to track down the unm arred purity o f expression. T hrough a strange p ara­ dox, the m eaning would isolate the concentrated purity o f ex-pressivity only when the relation to a certain outside would be sus­ pended. Only to a certain outside, because this reduction will not erase and in deed shall reveal in pure expressivity the relation to the o b ­ ject, the aim o f an objective ideality, over and against the intention o f m ean in g , over and against the Bedeutungsintention. What we ju st called a p arad o x is in truth only the ph enom en ological project in its essence. Beyond the opposition between “idealism ” and “realism ,” “subjectivism ” an d “objectivism ,” etc., phen om en ological transcendental idealism responds to the necessity to describe the objectivity o f the object (Gegenstand) and the/w?sence o f the present (Gegemvart)— and the objec­ tivity in p resen ce— on the basis o f an “interiority” or rather on the basis of a selfLproximity, o f an ownness (Eigenheit) which is not a sim ple inside, but the intim ate possibility o f the relation to an over-there and to an outside in general. This is why the essence o f intentional consciousness will be revealed (for exam ple in Ideas /, §49) only in the reduction o f the totality o f the existing world in general. This m ovem ent is already sketched in the First Logical Investiga­ tion in relation to expression and m eaning as being a re­ lation to the object. H usserl says, ‘Expressions un fold their function o f m eaning [Bedeutungsfunktion ] even in the solitary life of the soul, where they no longerfunction as indications. In truth therefore

:i: First Logical Investigation, §1.

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the two concepts o f sign are not really related to one another as concepts . that are wider or narrow er.”ιυ Before open in g this field o f the solitary life o f the soul in order to recover expressivity in it, it is necessary therefore to determ ine and re­ duce the dom ain of indication. This is what H usserl begins by doing. But before following him in this analysis, let us p au se for a m om ent. The m ovem ent that we ju st com m en ted upon is actually open to two possible readings. On the one hand, H usserl seem s to repress, with a dogm atic haste, a question about the structure of the sigyi in general. By prop o sin g from the start a radical dissociation between two heterogeneous types o f sign, between indication and expression , he d oes not ask h im self what the sign in general is. T he concept o f sign in gen eral— which he has to use at the begin n in g and to which he would have to grant a hearthstead o f sense— is able to receive its unity only from an essence. T he general concept can only be patterned on the essence. And the essence must be recognized in an essential structure o f experien ce and in the fam iliar­ ity o f a horizon. In order to hear the word “sign” at the open in g o f the problem atic, we must already have a relation o f pre-understanding with the essence, the function, or the essential structure o f the sign in general. Then, however, will we be able eventually to distinguish between the sign as indication and the sign as expression, even if the two types o f signs are not ordered according to the relations o f genus and species. A ccording to a distinction which is itself H usserlian (cf. First Logical Investigation, §13), one can say that the category o f the sign in general is not a genus but rather a form. What therefore is a sign in general? For many reasons, ou r am bition is not to answer this question. We only want to suggest the sense in which H usserl may seem to evade it. “Every sign is a sign fo r som eth in g”— “for som eth in g” (fü r etwas), these are H u sserl’s first words, the words that immediately introduce the dissociation o f expression fro m indica­ tion: “But not every sign has a ‘B ed eu tu n g,’ a ‘sen se’ [Sinn] that the sign ‘expresses.’ ” This p resupposes that we knew implicitly what “being-for” m eans, in the sense o f “being-in-the-place-of.” We m ust un derstand in a fam iliar way this structure o f substitution or o f referral so that, in this structure, the heterogeneity between indicative referral and expressive referral becom es consequently intelligible, indeed, dem on strated— and even so that the evidentness o f their relations com es to be accessible for us, perhaps in the sense in which H usserl hears it. A little later (in §8), H usserl will in fact dem on strate that expressive referral (Hinzulenken, Hinzeigen) is not indicative referral (Anzeigen). But no original question is posed about Zeigen in general, which, pointing the finger in this way at

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the invisible, can then be m odified into Hinzeigen or into Anzeigen. However, we can already gu ess— and perh aps we shall later verify it— that this “Z eigen” is the place in which the root and the necessity o f all the “entanglem ents” between indication and expression are announced. “Z eigen” is the place in which all the oppositions and differences that will henceforth crisscross H u sserl’s analysis (and that will be wholly form ed within the concepts o f traditional m etaphysics) are not yet sketched out. But H usserl, choosing the logicity o f signification as his theme, believ­ ing already that he is able to isolate the logical a prion from pure gram ­ mar within the general a priori o f grammar, is resolutely engaged in one o f the m odifications o f the gen eral structure o f Zeigen: Hinzeigen and not Anzeigen. Does this absence o f a question in regard to the starting point and the pre-understanding o f an operative concept necessarily translate into a dogm atism ? On the other hctncl, may we not interpret this as critical vigi­ lance? Is not what is at issue precisely the rejection or erasure o f p re ­ u n derstan d in g as the ap p aren t starting point, indeed, its rejection or erasure as a kind o f prejud ice or presum ption ? By what right may we presum e the essential unity o f som ething like the sign? And what if H us­ serl wanted to break up the unity o f the sign, to dem onstrate that it has a unity only in appearance, to reduce it to a verbality without concept? And what if there were not one concept o f sign and several types o f sign, but two irreducible concepts to which we have im properly attached one sole word? At the begin n in g o f the second section, Husserl speaks precisely o f “two concepts attached to the word ‘sig n .’ ” By blam ing him for not beginning with an interrogation o f the sign-being o f the sign in general, are we not trusting in a rather hasty way the unity o f a word? More seriously, by asking “what is the sign in gen eral,” we subordi­ nate the question o f the sign to an ontological design. We claim to assign to signification a place, which m ight be fundam ental or regional, within an ontology. This would be a classical way o f proceeding. We would sub­ ordinate the sign to truth, lan guage to being, speech to thought, and writing to sp e e ch .11 Is it not the case that, by saying that there can be a truth fo r the sign in general, we are assum ing that the sign is not the possibility o f truth, that the sign does not constitute truth, but is content to signify the truth, to reproduce it, to incarnate it, and to inscribe it secondarily or to refer to it? For, if the sign som ehow preceded what we call truth or essence, it would m ake no sense to speak o f the truth or the essence o f the sign. Is it not possible to think— and doubtlessly H usserl has don e this— that the sign, for exam ple if we consider the sign as the structure o f an intentional m ovem ent, does not fall un der the category o f the thing in general (Sache), that the sign is not a “bein g” about whose

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being we would have ju st posed a question? Is not the sign som ething other than a being? Is it not the sole “th in g” which, not being a thing, does not fall under the question o f “what is”? And in contrast, does not the sign som etim es p rodu ce the question, thus produce “philosophy” as the em pire o f the ti esti? By asserting that “logical Bedeutung is an expression ,” that there is theoretical truth only in a statem ent,”' by engagin g resolutely in a ques­ tion concerning linguistic expression as the possibility o f truth, by not presu p p o sin g the essential unity o f the sign, H usserl could a p p e a r to reverse the direction o f the traditional procedu re and respect in the ac­ tivity o f signification what, having no truth in itself, conditions the move­ m ent and the concept o f truth. And in fact, throughout an itinerary that ends up at “The O rigin o f Geom etry,” H usserl will give a growing atten­ tion to what in signification, in language, and in inscription as it writes ideal objectivity down, produces truth or ideality rather than records it. But this last m ovem ent is not sim ple. H ere is our problem and we will have to return to it. T he historical destiny o f ph en om enology seem s, no m atter what, to be contained between these two motives. On the one hand, phenom enology is the reduction o f naive ontology, the return to an active constitution o f sense and validity, to the activity o f a life that produces truth and validity in gen eral through its signs. But at the sam e time, without being simply ju x tap o sed to this m ovement,^ another necessity confirm s also the classical m etaphysics o f presen ce and indi­ cates that ph en om en ology belongs to classical ontology. We have chosen to be interested in this relation in which ph en om ­ enology belongs to classical ontology.

* This is a very frequent comment, starting with the Logical Investigations (cf., for example, introduction, §2) all the way up to “The Origin of Geometry.” f This is a movement on the basis o f which we can interpret in diverse ways the relation to metaphysics ancl to classical ontology. It is a critique which would have determinate, lim­ ited, but certain affinities with that of Nietzsche and o f Bergson. In any case, the critique belongs to the unity o f a historical configuration. That this critique, in the historical con­ figuration of these reversals, continues metaphysics is one of the most perm anent themes o f H eidegger’s meditation. So, concer ning these problems (the starting point in the pre­ understanding of the sense of a word, the privilege o f the question “what is,” the relation between language and being or truth, the belonging to classical ontology, etc.), only on the basis o f a superficial reading of H eidegger’s texts could one conclude that H eidegger’s texts fall under the blow of these objections. On the contrary, we think, without being able to develop it here, that no one has ever better escaped from them prior to H eidegger’s texts, which does not mean that one escapes fi om the objections often after H eidegger’s texts.

The Reduction of Indication

That phenom enology belongs to metaphysics is revealed doubtlessly in the them e to which we are now returning: the exteriority o f indication in relation to expression. H usserl devotes only three sections to “the essence o f indication” and, in the sam e chapter, eleven sections are devoted to ex­ pression. Since, according to a logical and epistem ological concern, what is at issue is to secure the originality o f expression as “m eaning” and as the relation to an ideal object, the treatm ent o f indication must be brief, preliminary, and “reductive.” It is necessary to push indica­ tion to the side, abstract it, “red u ce” it as an extrinsic and em pirical phe­ nom enon, even though a strict relation unites it in fact to expression, in­ terweaves it empirically with expression. But such a reduction is difficult. Only in ap p earan ce does it look as though at the end o f the third section the reduction is accom plished. Indicative attachments, at times o f another type, will not stop ap p earin g later, and their elim ination will be an infi­ nite task. H u sserl’s whole enterprise— and well beyond the Logical Inves­ tigations— will be threatened if the Verflechtung attaching indication onto expression is absolutely irreducible and in principle inextricable, if indi­ cation were not added onto expression as a m ore or less tenacious bond, but inhabited the essential intimacy o f the m ovem ent o f expression. What is an indicative sign? First it can be natural (the canals o f Mars indicate the possible presence o f intelligent beings) as well as artificial (the chalk mark, branding, all the instrum ents o f conventional design a­ tio n )/' The opposition between nature and institution has no relevance

* In the logic of his exam ples ancl of his analysis, Husserl coulcl have citecl the grapheme in general. Although writing is for him— there is no doubt about it— indicative in its proper stratum, it poses a considerable problem which probably explains Husserl’s careful silence here. Even if we suppose that writing is indicative in the sense that he gives to this word, it has a strange privilege that risks the disorganization o f all the essential distinctions. What phonetic writing (or better, in the purely phonetic part o f the kind of writing that is improperly and globally called phonetic) would “indicate” would be an “expression.” Nonphonetic writing would be substituted fo r expressive discourse in such a way that nonphonetic discourse would substitute for that which unites expressive discourse immediately to the “m eaning” (bedeuten) . We are not here stressing this problem, but it belongs to the ultimate horizon of this essay.

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here and does not divide the unity o f the indicative function. What is this unity? Husserl describes it as that o f a certain “m otivation” (Motivierung). Motivation is what gives to som ething like a “thinking bein g” the move­ m ent in order to pass in thought from som ething to som ething. For the m om ent, this definition m ust rem ain rather general. This passage can be that o f conviction (Überzeugung) or o f presum ption (Vermutung) and it always links an actual knowledge right now to a non-actual know ledge.1 In relation to m otivation con sidered at this degree o f generality, this know ledge can concern any object (Gegenstand) or state-of-affair (Sach­ verhalt) an d not necessarily em pirical existents, that is, individuals. In ord er to design ate the category o f the known (actual or non-actual), H usserl by design m akes use therefore o f very general concepts (Sein, Bestand) which can cover bein g or subsistence, the structure o f ideal ob­ jects as well as em pirical existents. Sein, bestehen, Bestand— words that are frequent and fundam ental at the begin n in g o f this section — are not to be reduced to Dasein, existieren, Realität, and this difference is quite im por­ tant to H usserl, as we are goin g to verify in a m om ent. H usserl thus defines the m ost general essential com m on character­ istic that gathers together all the indicative functions: In these cases we discover as a common characteristic the following situation: certain objects or states of affairs whatsoever whose subsistence [Bestand] of which someone has actual knowledge indicate [cinzeigen] to him the s ubsistence of certain other objects or states of affairs, in the sense that his conviction in the being [Sein] of the one is experienced as motivating (though as a non-evident motivation) a conviction or a presumption in the being

of the others."7But this essential com m on characteristic is still so gen eral that it covers the whole field o f indication an d som ething else as well. O r rather, since it is really an Anzeigen that is bein g described here, let us say that this essential com m on characteristic overflows indication in the strict sense. We are now goin g to have to ap proach this strict sense o f indication. And we see then why it was im portant to distinguish between Sein and Bestand on the one hand, and Existenz, Dasein, or Realität on the other. General motivation thus defin ed is that o f a “b ecau se” which can have the sense o f indicative allusion (Hinweis) as well as that o f deductive, evident, and apodictic dem onstration (Beweis). In the latter case, the “becau se” links together evident and ideal necessities which are perm anen t and persis­ tent beyond every em pirical liic et nunc. H usserl says, “An ideal rule is

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here revealed which extends its sway beyond the ju d gm en ts linked by motivation hic et nunc and em braces as such in a m eta-em pirical gen eral­ ity all the ju d gm en ts o f like content and m oreover all the ju d gm en ts o f like ‘fo rm ’ [F o m ].”3 M otivations linking lived-experiences, the acts in* tending objective-ideal, necessary, and evident idealities may be o f the order o f contingent and em pirical, “non-evident” indication. But the re­ lations uniting the contents o f ideal objects, in evidential dem onstration, do not belon g to indication. The entire analysis o f section 3 d e m o n ­ strates that ( 1 ) even if A indicates B with a com plete empirical certainty (with the highest probability), this indication will never be a dem on stra­ tion o f apodictic necessity, and, to find here again the classic schem a, it will never be a dem onstration o f “truths o f reason ” in opposition to “truths o f fact.” Section 3 ’s analysis also dem onstrates (2) that even if in­ dication seems nevertheless to intervene in a dem onstration, it will always be on the side o f psychical m otivations, acts, convictions, etc., and never on the side o f the contents o f truths that are linked together. This indispensable distinction between Hinweis and Beweis, indica­ tion and dem onstration, not only poses a problem form ally analogous to the one that we were op en in g up earlier in relation to Zdgen. What is m onstration (Weisen) in gen eral prior to its distribution into indica­ tion that points the finger (Hinweis) at the non-seen and into dem o n ­ stration (Beweis) which allows som ething to be seen in the evidentness o f the p ro o f?4 Also, this distinction sharpens then the difficulty o f the “entanglem en t” that we have already pointed out. In fact, we know now that, in the ord er o f signification in general, every psychical lived-experience, on the side o f its acts, even when the acts aim at idealities and objective necessities, is involved only with indica­ tive concatenations. Indication falls outside o f the content o f absolutely ideal objectivity, that is, outside o f the truth. H ere again, this exteriority, or rather this extrinsic characteristic of indication, is inseparable, in its possibility, from the possibility o f all the reductions to com e, whether they are eidetic or transcendental. H aving its “origin ” in ph enom en a o f association-' and always con nectin g em pirical existents in the world,

* Cf. §4: “The psychical facts in which the notion o f indication has its ‘origin,’ i.e., in which it can be abstractively apprehended, belong to the wider group o f facts which fall under the historical rubric o f the ‘association of ideas.’ ” We know that, while renewing it ancl using it in the field of transcendental experience, Hus­ serl has never stopped working with the concept o f “association.” Here, what is excluded from pure expressivity is indication and thereby association in the sense of empirical psy­ chology. We must bracket empirical psychical livecl-experiences in order to recognize the ideality of the Bedeutung that orders expression. The distinction between indication and

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indicative signification will cover, in lan guage, all o f what falls un der the blows o f the “reduction s”: factuality, m undane existence, essential non­ necessity, non-evidence, etc. Do we not already have the right to say that the entire future problem atic o f the reduction and all the conceptual differences in which they are declared (fact/essen ce, transcendentality/ m undanity, and all the opposition s that are systematic with them ) are developed in a hiatus between two types o f signs? At the sam e time as the hiatus, if not in it and thanks to it? Is it n ot the case that the concept o f parallelism., which defines the relations between the p u re psychical— which is in the w orld— and the pure transcendental— which is not in the w orld— and which gath ers together in this way the entire enigm a o f H us­ serl’s phenom enology, is it not the case that this is announced here in the form o f a relation between two m odes o f signification? And yet Husserl, who never wanted to assim ilate experien ce in general (em pirical or tran­ scendental experience) to language, is constantly going to try to keep sig­ nification outside the self:presence o f transcendental life. The question that we ju st raised would m ake us pass from com m entary to interpreta­ tion. If we could answer the question in the affirmative, we would have to conclude, against Husser l’s express intention, that the “reduction ,” even before it becom es a m ethod, would be mer ged with the most spon tan e­ ous act of spoken discourse, the sim ple practice o f speech, the power o f expression. Although this conclusion must constitute in our eyes, in a certain sense, the “truth” o f phenom enology, it would contradict at a certain level H u sserl’s express intention for two sorts o f reasons. On the one hand, this conclusion goes against H u sserl’s express intention because, as we were recalling earlier, H usserl believes in the existence o f a pre-expressive and pre-linguistic stratum o f sense which the reduction will at times have to unveil by excluding the stratum o f language. On the other hand, if there is no expression and no m eaning without discourse, not all discourse is “expressive.” A lthough there is no possible discourse without an expressive kernel, we could alm ost say that the totality o f discourse is gripped by an indicative web.

expression appears therefore first of all in the necessarily ancl provisionally “objectivist” phase of phenomenology, when one has to neutralize empirical subjectivity. Does it keep its value when the transcendental thematic will found the analysis and when we retur n to constituting subjectivity? Such is the question which Husserl has never opened afterward. He has continued to make use of the “essential distinctions” from the first of the Logical Investigations. He has never, however, started over, repeated, in regard to them this work of thematization by which all his other concepts have been untiringly taken up, verified, constantly reappearing at the center o f a description.

Meaning as Soliloquy

Let us suppose that indication is excluded. What rem ains is expres­ sion. What is expression? It is a sign ch arged with Bedeutung. H usserl attem pts to define it in the fifth section: Ausdrücke als bedeutsame Zeichen. Expressions are signs that “m ean ” } A) Doubtlessly Bedeutung com es upon the sign and transform s it into expression only with speech , with oral discourse. H usserl writes, “from indicative signs we distinguish meaningf ul signs, i.e., expressio n sBut why expressions and why “ m ean in gful” signs ? We are able to explain this only by tying together a whole sh eaf of reasons within the p rofoun d unity o f on e and the sam e intention. 1. Ex-pression is exteriorization. E xpression im prints in a certain outside a sense which is discovered first in a certain inside. Earlier we suggested that this outside and this inside were absolutely original: the outside is neither nature, nor the world, nor a real exteriority in relation to consciousness. H ere is the place to specify this outside. T he bedeuten intends an outside which is that o f an ideal o b je ct. This outside then is ex-pressed, p asses outside o f itself into anoth er outside, which is still “in” consciousness. As we are goin g to see, expressive discourse has no need, as such and in its essence, o f bein g factually uttered in the world. Expression as a m eaningful sign is therefore a double exiting o f sense (Sinn) outside o f itself in itself, in consciousness, in the with-itself and the nearby-itself that H usserl begins by determ in­ ing as the “solitary life o f the sou l.”“ Later, after the discovery o f the tran­ scendental reduction, he will describe the solitary life o f the soul as the noetico-noem atic sphere o f consciousness. If we refer, in anticipation and fo r the sake o f m ore clarity, to the correspon din g sections o f Ideas If we see how the “unproductive” stratum o f expression com es to reflect, “to m irror” (widerzuspiegeln) every oth er intentionality in re g a rd to its form and to its content. T he relation to objectivity therefore indicates a “pre-expressive” (vor-ausdrücklich) intentionality that aim s at a sense which will be then transform ed into a Bedeutung and an expression. It is not at all obvious that this reflected and repeated “exiting” toward the noem atic sense and then toward expression is an unproductive redou­ bling, especially if we con sider that by “unproductivity” H usserl intends

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thus a “productivity that is exhausted in the expressing ancl in the form of the conceptual which is introduced with the expression .”"' 3 T herefore we will have to return to this. We only wanted to note here what “exp ressio n ” m eans according to H usserl: the exiting o f an act outside o f itself, then o f a sen se which is able to rem ain in itself only in the voice, in the “ph e­ nom enological” voice. 2. In the Logical Investigations, the w ord “expression ” is already im ­ posed fo r another reason. Expression is an intentional, thoroughly con­ scious, decided, voluntary exteriorization. T here is no expression without the intention o f a subject anim ating the sign, endowing it with Geistigkeit. In indication, anim ation has two limits: the body o f the sign which is not a breath, an d the indicated, which is an existence in the world. In expres­ sion, the intention is absolutely on p urpose because it anim ates a voice which can rem ain wholly internal and because the expressed is a Bedeutung, that is, an ideality that does not “exist” in the world. 3. L o ok in g at it from an oth er view point will confirm that there can be no expression without a voluntary intention. In fact, expression is always inhabited, anim ated by a bedeuten, as a wanting-to-say , because for H usserl the Deutung, let us say, the interpretation, the understanding, or the cognition, o f the Bedeutung c m never have taken place outside o f oral discourse {Recle). Only such a discourse can m ake itself available to a Deutung. The latter is never essentially a reading but rath er a hearing. What “wants to say,” what the “m ean in g” wants to say, the Bedeutung, is reserved for the one who speaks and who speaks insofar as he says what he wants to say: on purpose, explicitly, and consciously. Let us verify this. Husserl recognizes that his use o f the w ord “expression” “constrains” the language a little. But the constraint which is thus practiced purifies his intention and at once reveals a com m on stock o f m etaphysical im pli­ cations. H usserl writes, “We shall lay down, for provisional intelligibility, that each discourse [Recle\ or part o f discourse [Recleteil], as also each sign that is essentially o f the sam e sort, shall count as an expression, whether or not such discourse is actually uttered [wirklich geredet], or addressed with com m unicative intent to any persons or not.”4 Thus all o f what con­ stitutes the actuality o f what is uttered, the physical incarnation o f the Bedeutung, the body o f speech, which in its ideality belongs to an em piri­ cally d eterm in ate lan guage, is, if not outside o f discourse, at least for-

* Ideas 1, §124. Elsewhere we analyze more directly the problematic of “wanting-to-say” ancl expression in Ideas I. See “La f orme et le vouloir-clire: Note sur la phénom énologie du lan­ gage,” in Reime internationale de philosophie, Sept. 1967.

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eign to expressivity as such, to this pure intention without which no dis­ course would be possible. T he entire stratum o f em pirical actuality, that is, the factual totality o f discourse, belongs to this indication, the extent o f which we have not finished recognizing. T h e actuality, the totality o f these events o f discourse, is not only indicative because it is in the world, aban don ed to the world, but also, correlatively, because, as such, the actuality o f discourse keeps in itself som ething o f involuntary associa­ tion. For if intentionality has never simply m eant will , it indeed seem s that in the o rd er o f the lived-experiences o f expression (supposing that it has limits) intentional consciousness and voluntary consciousness are, in H usserl’s eyes, synonyms. And if we were ju st thinking— as H us­ serl will authorize in Ideas I — that every intentional lived-experience can in principle be taken up into a lived-experience o f expression, we should perhaps conclude that, despite all the them es o f receptive or intuitive intentionality and o f passive genesis, the concept o f intentionality is still taken in the tradition o f a voluntaristic metaphysics, that is, perhaps taken simply in the metaphysics. T h e explicit teleology that orders all o f tran­ scendental phenom enology would basically be only a transcendental vol­ untarism . Sense wants to signify itself; it expresses itself only in a wantingto-say which is only a wanting-to-say-itself o f the presence o f sense. This explains that all o f what escapes from pure spiritual intention, from pure anim ation by the Geist which is the will, all o f that is excluded from bedeuten and therefore from expression: fo r exam ple, facial expres­ sions, the various gestures, the totality o f the body and o f m undane regis­ tration, in a word, the totality o f the visible as such and o f the spatial as such. As such — that is, insofar as they are not w orked over by Geist, by the will, by the Geistigkeit which, in the word as well as in the hum an body, transform s the Körper into Leib (into flesh). T he opposition o f the soul and the body is not only at the center o f this doctrine o f signification, it is confirm ed by the doctrine and, as it has always basically been d on e in philosophy, the opposition d ep en d s on an interpretation o f language. Visibility as such and spatiality as such could only lose the self-presence o f the will and o f the spiritual anim ation which opens up discourse. They are literally the death of that self presence. Thus, as H usserl writes, Such a definition exclud es [from expression ] facial expression s ancl the various gestures which involuntarily [-unwillkürlich] accom pany speech without com m unicative intent, or those in which a p erso n ’s psychic states achieve u n d erstan dab le “ex p re ssio n ” for his environm ent, without the aclclecl help o f discourse. Such “extern alization s” [Äusserun­ gen] are not expression s in the sense o f discourse [Rede], they have no p h en om en al unity, in the consciousness o f th e o n e who externalizes

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him self, with the extern alized livecl-expei iences. By m eans o f them, an individual com m unicates nothing to another. In the externalization of these livecl-experiences by means o f them , the intention to expose som e “th ou gh t” in an express way [in aiisdrikkdicher Weise] is m issing, whether for the individual him self, in his solitary state, or for others. Such “e x ­ p ressions,” in short, have properly speaking no Bedeutung,r>

They do not want to say anything because they do not want to say anything. In the ord er o f signification, the express intention is an intention to ex­ press. T he im plicit does not belon g to the essence o f discourse. What H usserl asserts here concerning gestures and facial expressions would o f course have to hold a fortiori for p recon scious or unconscious language. T hat we may eventually “in terpret” the gesture, the facial expres­ sion, the non-conscious, the involuntary, indication in general, that we may at times take them up and m ake them explicit in a discursive and express commentary, that only confirm s, in H usserl’s eyes, the precedin g distinctions. This interpretation (Deutung) m akes a latent expression be heard, a wan ting-to-say (bedeuten ) which was still h old in g it­ self in reserve. Non-expressive signs want to say (bedeuten) only insofar as one can make them say what was m urm uring in them, what was wanting to be said in a sort o f m um bling. Gestures want to say only insofar as we can listen to them, interpret them (deuten). As long as we identify Sinn and Bedeutung, all o f what resists the Deutung \las no sense and is not lan­ gu age in the strict sense. The essence o f lan guage is its telos and its telos is voluntary consciousness as wanting-to-say. The indicative sphere which rem ains outside expressivity so defin ed dem arcates the failure o f this telos. The indicative sphere represents all o f what, while interweaving itself with expression, cannot be taken up into a deliberate discourse that is perm eated by wanting-to-say. For all o f these reasons, we do not have the right to distinguish between indication and expression as between a non-linguistic sign and a linguistic sign. H usserl traces out a bo rd er which does not pass between lan guage and non-language, but, within lan gu age in general, between the express an d the non-express (with all o f their connotations). For it would be difficult— and in fact im possible— to exclude from language all the indicative forms. At most, we can therefore distinguish with H usserl between linguistic signs “in the strict sen se” and linguistic signs in the broad sense, ju stify in g his exclusion o f gestures and facial expression, H usserl in effect concludes: It is not to the poin t that an o th er person may interpret [deuten] ou r involuntary externalizations [unwillkürlichen Äusserungen], e.g., our

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“expressive m ovem ents,” ancl that he may thereby becom e deeply ac­ quain ted with our inner thoughts ancl em otions. They (these externalizations) “want to say” [bedeuten] som eth in g to him insofar as he inter­ prets [deuiet] them, bu t even for him they have no Bedeutungen in the strict sense o f linguistic signs [ini prägnanten Sinne sprachlicher Zeichen], but only in the sense o f indicating/' ()

This leads us to look fo r the limit o f the indicative field still farther-. In fact, even for the one who restores the discursivity in the gestures o f others, the indicative m anifestations o f others are not transform ed into expressions. It is the interpreter who expresses him self in regard to them. Perhaps there is som eth in g in the relation to others that m akes indication irreducible. B) In fact, it is not en ough to recognize oral discourse as the m i­ lieu o f expressivity. Once we have excluded all the non-discursive signs which are given im m ediately as exterior to speech (gestures, facial ex­ pressions) , still we find, this time within speech, a non-expressivity whose scope is considerable. This non-expressivity is not only based on the physical side o f expression (“the sensible sign, the articulate phonic com plex, the sign written on p a p e r”). Husserl writes, “T he sim ple distinc­ tion between physical signs and sense-giving lived-experiences in general is by no means enough, and not at all enough for logical p u rp o ses.”7 Considering now the non-physical side o f discourse, Husserl there­ fo re excludes from it, always under the h eadin g o f indication, all that arises fro m the communication or from the manifestations o f psychical livedexperience. The m ovem ent that justifies this exclusion should teach us a lot about the m etaphysical tenor o f this phenom enology. The them es which are presented here will never be put back into question by Husserl. On the contrary, they will constantly get confirm ed. They are goin g to make us think that what, in the final analysis, separates expression from indication is what we could call the im m ediate non-selfLpresence o f the living present. The values o f m undane existence, naturality, sensibility, empiricity, association, etc., which determ ined the concept of indication, are p e rh ap s— across o f course m any m ediations that we are anticipat­ in g— goin g to find their final unity in this non-presence. And this nonself-presence o f the living presen t will qualify sim ultaneously the relation to others in general and the self-relation o f tem poralization. This is sketched out slowly, discretely, but rigorously in the Logical Investigations. We have seen that the difference between indication and

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expression was functional or intentional but not substantial. H usserl can therefore con sid er that the elem ents o f the- order that is substantially discursive (words, the parts o f discourse in general) function in certain cases as indications. And this indicative function o f discourse is massively at work. All discourse, insofar as it is engaged in a communicat ion and insofar as it manifests lived-experiences, operates as indication. In this case, words act like gestures. Or rather, the very con cept o f gesture should be d e­ term ined on the basis o f indication as non-expressivity. Husserl admits, of course, that the function for which expression is “originally fra m ed ” is com m unication. ' 8 And yet expression is never purely itself insofar as it fulfills this originative function. Only when com ­ m unication is suspen ded is pure expressivity able to appear. What in fact happens in com m unication? Sensible (audible or vis­ ible, etc.) ph en om en a are anim ated by the acts o f a subject who endows them with sense, and sim ultaneously another subject m ust understand the anim ating subject’s intention. Now “anim ation” cannot be p u re and total. It m ust traverse the non-diaphaneity o f a body and in a certain way be lost there. H usserl writes, But this com m unication becom es a possibility if the au d ito r also under­ stands the sp eak er’s intention. H e does this inasm uch as he takes the sp eak er to be a person, who is not m erely uttering sounds but speak­ ing to him, who is accom panying those soun ds with certain sense-giving acts, which the sounds reveal to the hearer, or whose sense they seek to com m unicate to him. What first m akes spiritual exch an ge possible, ancl turns conn ected discourse into a discourse, lies in the correlation am on g co rrespo n d in g physical ancl psychic livecl-experiences o f com ­ m unicating persons which is m ediated by the physical side o f speech .9

Everything in my discourse which is destined to m anifest a livedexperience to another person must pass through the m ediation o f the physical side. This irreducible m ediation involves every expression in an indicative operation. T h e m anifestation function (kundgebende Funk­ tion) is an indicative function. H ere we are drawing n ear to the root o f indication: there is indication each time that an act endow ing sense, the an im atin g intention, the living spirituality o f a m eaning , is not fully present. In effect, when I listen to anoth er person, his lived-experience is not presen t to me “in p erso n ” and originally. I can have, H usserl thinks, an originary intuition, that is, an im m ediate

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perception, o f what is exposed o f that person in the world, the visibility o f his body, his gestures, a perception o f what lets itself be heard from the sounds that he utters. But the subjective side o f his experience, his consciousness, the acts by which in particular he endows sense to the signs, are not im m ediately and originarily present as they are for him and as mine are for me. Here we have an irreducible and definitive limit. T he lived-experience o f another becom es m anifest to me only insofar as it is m ediately indicated by the signs involving a physical side. The very idea o f the “physical,” o f the “physical side,” can only be thought in its prop er difference on the basis o f this m ovem ent o f indication. In o rd e r to explain the irreducibly indicative character o f m anifes­ tation, even in discourse, H usserl already proposes motives whose system the fifth o f the Cartesian Meditations will develop minutely. O utside o f the transcendental m onadic sphere o f my own (mir eigenes), outside o f the propriety o f my own (Eigenheit), o f my presen ce to myself, I have with what another owns, with the oth er’s presence to himself, only relations o f analogical appresentation, relations o f mediate ancl potential intentionality. O riginary presentation is forbidden to me. What will be described then un der the watchful eye o f a differentiated, audacious, and rigorous tran­ scendental reduction is here in the Logical Investigations sketched out in the “parallel” dim ension o f the psychical. H usserl writes, Th e h earer perceives the m anifestation in the sam e sense in which he perceives the very person who m anifests— even though the psychic p h en om en a which m ake him a person cannot fall, fo r what they are, in the intuitive grasp o f another. C om m on langu age credits us with percepts even o f other p e o p le ’s psychic livecl-experiences; we “se e” their anger, their pain, etc. Such talk is quite correct, as lon g as, e.g., we allow outward bodily things likewise to count as perceived, ancl as lon g as, in general, the notion of perception is not restricted to ad equ ate perception , to intuition in the strict sense. If the essential characteristic o f p erception lies in the intuitive intention [Vermeinen] claim ing to grasp a thing or an event insofar as they are them selves presen t [gegenwärtigen] — such an intention is possible, ancl it is even given in the im m ense majority o f cases without any conceptual or exp ress form ulatio n — then the graspin g o f the m anifestation [Kundncihme] is a sim ple perception o f the m anifestation [Kundgabe] . . . . The h earer perceives the fact that the one who is speaking is externalizing certain psychic livecl-experiences, ancl to that extent he also perceives these livecl-experiences. H e does not, however, live them him self; he has no “in tern al” p erception o f them, only an “e x tern al” perception. H ere we have the b ig difference between the actual grasp o f a bein g in

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adequ ate intuition, ancl the inten ded [vermeintlichen] grasp o f a b ein g u pon the fou ndation o f an intuitive but in adequ ate representation. In the form er case, we have to clo with a b ein g given in livecl-experience, in the latter case with a p resum ed [supponiertes\ being, to which no truth correspo n d s at all. Mutual u n d erstan din g dem an ds a certain correla­ tion am on g the psychic acts which are un folded fi om the two sides o f m anifestation ancl in the graspin g o f the m anifestation, but not at all their full identity.10

T he notion o f presence is the nerve o f this dem onstration. If com m u­ nication or m anifestation (Kundgabe) is essentially indicative, it is so be­ cause the presence o f the oth er’s lived-experience is denied to our origi­ nary intuition. Each time that the im m ediate and full presen ce o f the signified will be stolen away, the signifier will be o f an indicative nature. (This is why Kundgabe, which we are translating loosely by “m anifesta­ tion,” does not m anifest, renders n othin g m anifest, if m anifest m eans evident, open, offered “in p erso n .” Kundgabe announces and at the sam e tim e snatches away what it is inform ing us about.) All discourse, or rather, all o f what, in discourse, does not restore the im m ediate presence o f the signified content, is in-expressive. Pure expressivity will be the pure ac­ tive intention (spirit, psyche, life, will) o f a bedeuten that is anim ating a discourse whose content (Bedeutung) will be present. It is present not in nature, since indication alone takes place in nature and in space, but in consciousness. T herefore it is presen t to an “internal” intuition or to an “in tern al” perception. But we ju st un d erstood why it is presen t to an intu­ ition that is not that o f the other in a case o f com m unication. T herefore this is self-present in the life o f a present that has still not exited from itself into the world, into space, into nature. With all o f these “exitings” exiling this life o f self-presence into indication, we can be sure that indication, which covers so far nearly the entire surface o f language, is the process o f death at work in the signs. And as soon as the other appears, indicative lan gu age— which is an oth er nam e o f the relation to death — no longer lets itself be erased. T he relation to the oth er as non-presence is therefore the im pu­ rity o f expression. In ord er to reduce indication in language and attain once m ore finally pure expressivity, it is therefore necessary to suspend the relation to others. T h en I would no longer have to pass through the m ediation o f the physical side or through any appresentation in general. Section 8, “Expressions in the Solitary Life o f the Soul,” follows therefore a path which, from two viewpoints, is parallel to the path o f the reduction to the m onadic sphere o f Eigenheit in the Cartesian Meditations: the paral­ lel o f the psychical and the transcendental, and the parallel o f the stra-

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turn o f expressive lived-experiences and the stratum o f lived-experiences in general. H usserl says, So fa r we have con sid ered expressions as used in com m unication, which last d ep en d essentially on the fact that they operate inclicatively. But expression s also play a great part in the life o f the soul insofar as it is not en gaged in a relation o f com m unication. This change in func­ tion plainly has nothing to clo with whatever m akes an expression an expression. E xpression s continue to have their Bedeutungen as they had before, ancl the same Bedeutungen as in dialogue. A word only ceases to be a word when our interest is directed exclusively on the sensible, when it b ecom es a sim ple phonic form . B u t when we live in the u nder­ stan ding o f a word, it expresses som eth in g ancl the sam e thing, whether we address it to anyone or not. It seem s clear, therefore, th at an expres­ sio n ’s Bedeutung, ancl what yet belon gs to it essentially, cannot coincide with its activity o f m an ifestation .11

The first advantage o f this reduction to the interior m on ologue is therefore that the physical event o f lan guage seem s to be in deed absent from interior m onologue. To the extent that the unity o f the w ord— what m akes it recognizable as a word, as the same word, the unity o f a phonic com plex and a sen se— can n ot be m erged with the m ultiplicity o f the sensible events o f its em ploym ent nor does it d ep en d on them, the same­ ness o f the word is ideal. It is the ideal possibility o f repetition and it loses nothing with the reduction o f any, and therefore o f every em pirical event m arked by its ap p earan ce. While “what we are to use as an indication [the distinctive sign] m ust be perceived by us as an existent,”12 the unity o f a word owes nothing to its existence (Dasein, Existenz). Its expressivity, which does not need an em pirical body but only the ideal and identical form o f this body insofar as it is an im ated by a wanting-to-say, owes noth­ ing to any m undane, em pirical, etc. existence. In “the solitary life o f the sou l,” the pure unity o f expression as such should therefore finally be restored to me. Is this to say that in speaking to m yself I com m unicate nothing to m yself? Is it the case that then the “K u n d gab e” and the “K u n dn ah m e” are suspended? Is it the case th at non-presence is reduced and with it in­ dication, analogical detour, etc.? Do I then no longer m odify myself? Is it the case that I learn n othing about m yself? H usserl considers the objection and then sets it aside: “Shall one say that one who speaks in solitude to himself, and that for him also the words serve as signs [Zeichen], namely, indications [Anzeichen] o f his own psychic lived-experiences? I do not think that such a view m ust be h eld.” 13

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H u sserl’s argum entation here is decisive and we m ust follow it closely. T h e whole theory o f signification announced in this first chapter o f essential distinctions w ould collapse if a function o f Kundgabe/Kunclnah me would not let itself be reduced in the sphere o f my own lived-experiences, and if overall the ideal or absolute solitude o f “p ro p e r” subjectivity still needed indications in ord er to constitute its own self-relation. And fun­ dam entally let us not deceive ourselves here: the need fo r indications m eans quite sim ply the n eed for signs. For it is m ore and m ore clear that, despite the initial distinction between the indicative sign and the expres­ sive sign, only indication is truly a sign for H usserl. Full exp ressio n — that is, as we shall see later, the fulfilled intention o f the m ean in g— in a certain way, escapes from the con cept o f sign. Already in the sentence that we ju st cited from H u sserl, we could read: “signs, namely, indica­ tions.” But let us still con sider that as a slip o f the tongue whose truth will be revealed only later. Instead o f saying “signs, namely, indications” (als Zeichen, nämlich als Anzeichen), let us say: “signs, namely, signs in the form o f in dication s.” For on the surface o f his text, Husserl continues to re­ spect for the m om ent the initial distinction between two sorts o f signs. In order to dem onstrate th at indication no lon ger functions in the solitary life o f the soul, Husserl begins by m arking the difference between two kinds o f “referral”: referral as Hinzdgen (which we must keep from translating as indication, at least for conventional reasons and if we do not want to destroy the coherence o f the text; let us say arbitrarily “m on­ stration”) and referral as Anzeigen (indication). Now, as H usserl writes, if in silent m onologue “words function as signs here as they do everywhere,” an d if “everywhere we can speak simply o f an act o f m onstration [Hinzeigen\,”[4 then the transgression o f expression toward sense, o f the signifier toward the signified, is here no lon ger an indication. T he Hinzeigen is not an Anzeigen. For this transgression or, if you like, here this referral does without all existence (Dasein, Existenz). In contrast, in indication, an existing sign, an em pirical event refers to a content w hose existence is at least presum ed. It motivates ou r anticipation or our conviction o f the existence o f what is indicated. We cannot think indication without m aking the category o f em pirical, that is, m erely prob ab le, existence intervene, and this will also be the definition o f m undane existence for Husserl in opposition to the existence o f the ego cogito. T he reduction to m onologue is really a bracketing o f em pirical, m undane existence. In the “solitary life of the soul,” we no lon ger m ake use of real (wirklich) words, but only o f represented (vorgestellt) words. A nd lived-experience— about which we w ere w ondering if it was not itse lf “indicated” to the speaking subject— does not have to be thus indicated; it is im m ediately certain and self-present. While in real com m unication, existing signs indicate other

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existents which are only p robable and m ediately evoked, in m onologue, when the expression is full,'"'15 non-existent signs show the signifieds (Bedeutungen), which are ideal and therefore non-existent, and certain, for they are presen t to intuition. As for the certainty o f internal exis­ tence, it has no need, H usserl thinks, o f being signified. It is im m ediately present to itself. It is living consciousness. In interior m on ologue, the word would therefore be m erely rep ­ resented. Its place can be the im aginary (Phantasie). We are content to imagine the word whose existence is in this way neutralized. In this im agi­ nation o f the word, in this im aginary representation o f the word (Phan­ tasievorstellung) , we no lon ger need the em pirical event o f the word. We are indifferent to its existence or non-existence. For if we need then the imagination o f the word, at the sam e time we do without the imagined word. The im agination o f the word, the im agined, the im agined-being o f the word, its “im age,” is not the (im agined) word. Ju st as in the per­ ception o f the word, the (perceived or appearin g) word which is “in the world” belongs to a radically different ord er fro m that o f the perception or the ap p earin g o f the word, the perceived-being o f the word, likewise the (im agined) word is o f a radically heterogeneous order from that o f the im agination o f the word. T his difference, which is at once sim ple and subtle, m akes the irreducible specificity o f phenom enality appear. We are able to understand nothing o f ph en om en ology if we do not pay constant and vigilant attention to this specificity. But why is Husserl not satisfied with the difference between the ex­ isting (perceived) word and the perception or the perceived being, the

:i: In order not to confuse ancl multiply the difficulties, we are considering here in this precise place only perfect expressions, that is, the ones fo r which the “Bedeutungsinten­ tion” is “fulfilled.” We are authorized to do this insofar as this fullness, as we shall see, is the telos and the achievement of what Husserl wants here to isolate under the name o f wanting-to-say and expression. Non-fulfillment will bring to the surface originary problem s to which we shall return below. Let us cite the passage which suppor ts what we were just saying: “But if we reflect on the relation o f expression and Bedeutung, anci to this end break up our complex, intimately unified lived-experience o f the expression fulfilled with sense, into the two factors of word and sense, the word comes before us intrinsically indifferent, whereas the sense seems the thing aimed at by the verbal sign, and meant by its means: the expression seems to direct interest away fr om itself towards its sense [von sich ab und au f den Sinn hinzulenken], and to refer [,hinzuzeigen] to the latter. But this reference [Hinzeigen] is not an indication [das Anzei­ gen] in the sense previously discussed. The existence [Dasein] of the sign neither ‘motivates’ the existence of the meaning, nor, properly expressed, our conviction in the existence of the Bedeutung. What we are to use as an indication [the distinctive sign] must be perceived by us as existent [als daseiend]. This holds also of expressions used in communicative dis­ course, but not for expressions used in solitary discourse” (First Logical Investigation, §8).

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p h en om en on o f the word? It is because in the ph en om enon o f percep­ tion, a reference is located in phenom enality itself to the existence o f the word. T he sense “existen ce” belongs then to the phen om en on . This is no longer the case in the ph en om en on o f im agination. In im agination, the existence o f the word is not im plied, not even by m eans o f the inten­ tional sense. What then exists is only the im agination o f the word, which is itself absolutely certain and self:present insofar as it is a lived-experience. What we already have here is a phenom enological reduction, that isolates the subjective lived-experience as the sphere o f absolute certainty and absolute existence. This absolute o f existence appears only in the reduction o f existence that is relative to the transcendent world. And it is already im agination, “the vital elem ent o f ph en om en ology” {Ideas I ) ,16 which gives this m ovem ent its privileged m edium . H usserl writes, H ere [in solitary discou rse], we are in general content with represented w ords rather than with real words. In im agination, a spoken or printed word floats before us, though in reality it has no existence. We sh ould not, however, confuse im aginative represen tatio n s [Phantasievorstellun­ gen], ancl still less the contents o f im agination on which they rest, with their im agined objects. The im agined verbal sound, or the im agined printed word, does not exist, only its im aginative representation does so. T h e diff eren ce is the differen ce betw een im agined centaurs ancl the im agination o f such beings. T h e w ord’s non-existence [Nicht-Exislenz] n either disturbs nor interests us, since it leaves the w ord’s expressive function u n affecte d .17

T h is argum entation would be very fragile if it app ealed only to a classical psychology o f im agination. And it would be really unwise to un­ derstand it in this way. For such a psychology, the im age is a picture-sign whose reality (whether it is physical or psychical) indicates the im agined object. Husserl will show in Ideas I how such a conception leads to aporias."'

* Cf. §90 ancl the entire chapter 4 of part 3, in par ticular §99, 109,111, ancl especially 112: “This will only be changed when there will be more extensive practice in genuine phenomenologi­ cal analysis than heretofore has been the case. As long as one deals with livecl-experiences as ‘contents’ or as psychical ‘elements’ which are still regarded as bits of things [Sächelchen] de­ spite all the fashionable arguments against atomizing and physicalizing psychology, as long as one believes that he has found, accordingly, the distinction between ‘sensation-contents’ an d corresponding ‘fantasy-contents’ only in the material traits o f ‘intensity,’ ‘fullness,’ or the like, there can be no improvement. One must first learn to see that at issue here is a dif­ ference pertaining to consciousness.” Consequently, if it is a good auxiliary instrum ent for ph en om ­ enological neutralization, the im age is not pure neutralization. It keeps within itself the prim ary reference to an originary presentation, that is, to a perception and to a positing o f existence, to a belief in general. This is why the pure ideality to which neutralization provides ac­ cess is not fictional. This them e appears very early" and it will constantly fortify the polem ic against H um e. But it is not by accident that H u m e’s th ough t m ore and m ore fascin ated H usserl. T he pow er o f pure repe­ tition that opens ideality and the power that liberates the im aginative

intelligibility, ancl for the reason that we ju st indicated, this proposition is “absurd” (with the absurdity o f contradiction— Widersinmgkeit) and a fortiori “false.” But since the classical idea o f truth which guides these distinctions has itself issued from this way of getting rid o f the relation to death, this “falseness” is the truth itself o f truth. Therefore, it would be necessary to interpret these movements by means of other, wholly other “categories” (if we can still call such thoughts “categories” ). * See in particular, the Second Logical Investigation, chapter 2.

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reproduction o f em pirical perception cannot be foreign to one another. The sam e holds for what they produce. Also, on m ore than one point, the First Logical Investigation is quite disconcerting in this regard. 1. First, it is disconcerting insofar as expressive ph en om en a in their expressive purity are considered representations o f im agination (.Phan­ tasievorstellungen). 2. In the sphere o f interiority which is thus open ed by this fiction, we are calling the com m unicative discourse that a subject can contin­ gently address to him self (“you have gone w rong”) fictional. Calling it fictional allows one to think that a non-com municative, purely expressive discourse can actually take place in the “solitary life o f the soul.” 3. T hereby we assum e that, in com m unication, where the sam e words, the sam e expressive kernels are at work, where consequently pure idealities are in dispen sable, a rigorous distinction can be m ade between the fictional and the actual, and then between the ideal and the real, and that, consequently, actuality com es to be put on like an em pirical piece o f clothing that is external to expression, ju st like a body on a soul. And Husserl really m akes use o f these notions, even when he em phasizes the unity o f the soul and the body in intentional animation. This unity does not underm ine the essential distinction since it rem ains always a unity o f com position. 4. Within the pure, internal “representivity,” in the “solitary life o f the sou l,” certain types o f discourse could actually be held, as actually rep­ resentative (this would be the case o f expressive language and, let us say this already, purely objective, theoretico-logical d isco u rse), while certain others are still purely fictional (these fictions located in the fiction would be the indicative acts o f com m unication between m yself and myself, my­ self as an oth er and myself as myself, etc.). If we admit, as we have tried to show, that every sign in general con­ sists in an originarily repetitive structure, the general distinction between fictional usage and actual usage o f a sign is threatened. The sign is origi­ narily tuorkecl overbyfiction. T herefore, whether we are dealing with indica­ tive com m unication or expression, there is no sure criterion by m eans o f which to distinguish between an extern al lan guage and an internal language, and even if we grant the hypothesis o f an internal language, there is no sure criterion fo r distinguishing between an actual lan guage and a fictional language. Such a distinction, however, is indispensable for Husserl in order to prove that indication is external to expression, and for all that this distinction governs. If we declare that this distinction is illegitim ate, we foresee a whole chain o f form idable consequences for phenom enology.

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What we ju st said abo u t the sign holds thereby for the act o f the speaking subject. H usserl was saying therefore that “in the genuine sense o f com m unication, there is no speech in such cases, nor does one tell on eself anything: one m erely represents [man stellt sich vor] on eself as speaking and com m unicatin g.”7 T hat statem ent leads us to the sec­ ond argument that Husserl announced. Husserl m ust assum e therefore a difference between actual com m unication and the representation o f the self as speaking subject such that the self R epresentation can com e only to be jo in e d onto the act o f com m unication contingently and from the ex­ terior”. Now the originary structure o f repetition that we ju st evoked in re­ lation to the sign m ust govern the totality o f the acts o f signification. T he subject cannot speak without giving to him self his representation, and that representation is not an accident. We can therefore no m ore im agine an actual discourse without self-representation than a representation o f discourse without actual discourse. U ndoubtedly this representivity can be m odified, com plicated, reflected accordin g to the originary m odes that the linguist, the sem iologist, the psychologist, the theoretician o f literature or art, even the ph ilosoph er will be able to study. These m odes can be very original. But all o f them p resu p p o se the originary unity o f discourse and the representation o f discourse. Discourse represents it­ self, is its representation. Better, discourse is the self-representation.'” In a m ore general way, H usserl seem s to adm it that there can be a sim ple exteriority between the subject such as he is in his actual ex­ perien ce and what he represen ts to him self to be living. The subject would believe that he is saying som ething to him self an d com m unicat­ ing som ething to him self; in truth he would do nothing o f the kind. We m ight be tem pted to conclude on this basis that, since consciousness is then entirely invaded by the b elief or the illusion o f speaking-to-himself, an entirely false consciousness, the truth o f the experience would be o f the order o f non-consciousness. It is the opposite: consciousness is the self-presence o f the living, o f the Erleben, o f experience. The latter is sim ple and is never, essentially, affected by illusion since it relates only to

But if the re- of this re-presentation does not say the simple duplication— repetitive or reflective— that supervenes over a simple presence (which is what the word “representation” has always wanted to say) , then what we are approaching or advancing here concerning the relation between presence ancl representation must be opened up to other names. What we are describing as originary representation can be designated under this title only within the closure that we are attempting here to transgress, depositing in the closure, dem on­ strating in the closure contradictory or untenable propositions, attempting to produce se­ curely insecurity in the closure, opening it up to its outside, which can be clone only from a certain inside.

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itself in an absolute proximity. T he illusion o f speaking-to-oneself would float on its surface as an empty, peripheral, and secondary consciousness. L an g u age and its represen tation would com e to be added to a sim ple consciousness simply present to itself, to a lived-experience, in any case, which can reflect in silence its own presence. As H usserl will say in Ideas I, “Each lived-experience in general (each lived-experience actually alive, if we can say that) is a lived-experience according to the m ode o f ‘being presen t.’ B elo n gin g to its essence is the possibility o f reflection on the sam e essence in which it is necessarily characterized as being certain and presen t.”8 T he sign would be foreign to this selfp resen ce, which is the foun dation o f p resen ce in general. B ecause the sign is foreign to the self-present o f the living present, we can say that it is foreign to presence in general, in what we believe to be able to recognize u n der the nam e o f intuition or perception. Fo r— and this is the final argum ent in this section o f the Investiga­ tions— if representation in indicative discourse is false, in m on ologue it is useless. If the subject indicates nothing to him self, this is because he can­ not do it and he cannot indicate anything to him self because he has no need to do so. Since the lived-experience is im m ediately present to itself according to the m ode o f certainty and absolute necessity, the m anifes­ tation o f the self to itself by m eans o f delegation or the representation o f an indexical is im possible because it is superfluous. It would be, in all senses o f the word, without reason— therefore without cause. It would be without a cause because it would be without a purpose, “zwecklos,” as Husserl says. This Zwecklosigkeit o f internal com m unication is the non-alterity, the non-difference in the identity o f p resen ce as self-presence. O f course, this con cept o f presence d oes not m erely involve the enigm a o f the ap­ pearing o f a bein g in absolute proxim ity to itself; it also designates the tem poral essence o f this proximity, and this does not help to dispel the enigm a. The self-presence o f lived-experience has to be p rodu ced in the present as now. And this is really what H usserl says: if “psychical acts” are not an noun ced by them selves through the interm ediary o f a “K u n d gab e,” if they are not to be inform ed about them selves through the interm ediary o f indications, this is because they are “experientially lived by us at that very instant \im selben Augenblick] .”9 T he present o f self­ presence would be as indivisible as a blink of an eye.

The Sign and the Blink of an Eye

T he sharp point o f the instant, the identity o f lived-experience pres­ ent to itself in the sam e instant bears therefore the whole weight o f this dem onstration. Self:presen ce m ust be p ro d u ced in the undivided unity o f a tem poral present in ord er to have nothing to make known to itself by the proxy o f the sign. Such a perception or intuition o f the self by the self in presence would be not only the instance in which “significa­ tion” in general would not be able to have a place, it would also secure the possibility o f an originary perception or intuition in general, that is, non-signification as the “principle o f all prin ciples.” And later, each time that H usserl would like to indicate the sense o f originary intuition, he will recall that originary intuition is the experience o f the absence and uselessness o f the sign/' The dem onstration that concerns us occurs at a point in time earlier than The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. And for sys­ tematic as well as historical reasons, the tem porality o f lived-experience is not a them e o f the Logical Investigations. However, given the point where

* For example, the entire Sixth Logical Investigation constantly demonstrates that, between the acts ancl intuitive content on the one hancl and the acts and the signifying contents on the other, the phenom enological difference is “irreducible.” See especially §26. And yet the possibility of a “mixture” is admitted there, and this mixture would raise more than one question. The entire Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness rests on the radical dis­ continuity between intuitive presentation and “the symbolic representation which not only represents the object in an empty way, but also the representation ‘through’ signs or im­ ages.” In Ideas I, we can read, “Between perception on one sicle and symbolic representation through image or sign on the other, an unbridgeable eidetic dif­ ference exists. . . . We lapse into absurdity when we mix, as is clone ordinarily, these m odes of representation whose structures differ essentially, etc.” Ideas I, §43. confirm s the dom ination o f the present and rejects at once the “after-the-fact” way that an “unconscious content” becom es

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conscious, that is, the structure o f tem porality im plied by all o f F reu d ’s texts.'1' In fact, Husserl writes, It is a genuine absurdity to speak o f an “u n con scious” conten t that be­ com es conscious after the fact [nachträglich]. C onsciousness [.Bewußtsein] is necessarily being-conscious [bewiißlsein] in each o f its phases. Ju st as the retentional phase is conscious o f the p recedin g phase, without m aking it an object, what is originarily given is already con scious— ancl u n d er the specific fo rm o f the “now”— without being objective. . . . Th e retention o f an u n conscious conten t is im possible. . . . If each “con ten t” is in itself ancl necessarily “originarily co n sciou s,” it would be absurd to question one abou t a consciousness that would be given to it la ter. Î

2. Despite this motive for the punctual now as the “archi-form ” (Ur­ form) (Ideas I) o f consciousness, the con tent o f the description in The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness and elsewhere forbids us from speaking of a sim ple self-identity of the present. We thereby find shaken not only what we could call the m etaphysical security par excellence, but also, m ore locally, the argum ent o f the “im selben A ugenblick” found in the Logic cd Investigations.

* See on this subject our essay, “Freucl and the Scene o f Writing,” in Writing and Difference,

t The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, appendix 9.

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All o f 'The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Conscioiisness, in its critical work as well as in its descriptive work, d em onstrates and confirm s o f course the irreducibility o f re-presentation (Vergegenwärtigung, Repräsen­ tation) to presentational perception (Gegenwärtigung, Präsentation), the irreducibility o f secondary and reproductive m em ory to retention, o f im agination to originary im pression, and o f the reproduced now to the actual curren t now, whether it is perceived or retained, etc. W ithout being able to follow here the rigorous way in which 'The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Conscioiisness proceeds, and without it being necessary thereby to question the dem onstrative validity o f its treatm ent, we can still question its evidentiary soil and the milieu o f these distinctions, ques­ tion them about what relates the terms distinguished to one another and constitutes the very possibility o f the comparison. We see very quickly then that the presence o f the perceived presen t is able to ap p ear as such only insofar as it is in continuous composition with a non-presence and a non-perception, namely, prim ary m em ory and pri­ m ary anticipation (retention and protention). These non-perceptions are not added on, do not accom pany contingently the actually perceived now; indispensably and essentially they participate in its possibility. No dou bt Husserl says that retention is still a perception. But it is the absolutely unique case— H usserl has never spoken o f an o th er— o f a perception whose perceived is not a present but a past as the m odification o f the present: If we call p erception the act in luliich every origin resides, the act that consti­ tutes originarily, then primary memory is perception. For it is only in primary memory that we see the past, it is only in it that the past is constituted, ancl this happens not in a re-presentational way but on the contrary in a presentational way.8

Thus, in retention, the presentation that gives us som ething to see deliv­ ers a non-present, a past and inactual present. We can therefore suspect that if H usserl nevertheless calls this perception, it is because he is h old­ ing on to the radical discontinuity as passing between retention and re­ production, between perception and im agination, etc., and not between perception and retention. This is the nervus demonstrandi o f his criticism o f Brentano. H usserl absolutely holds onto there being “absolutely no question o f a continuous m ediation o f perception with its op p o site.”9 And yet, in the preced in g section, was not the question o f a con ­ tinuous m ediation posed in a really explicit way? Husserl says, If we now relate the term p erception with the differences in the way oj being given which tem poral objects have, the opposite oj perception is then

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primary memory ancl primcuy anticipation (retention ancl protention) which here com es on the scene, so that perception ancl non-perception pass continuously into one an o th er.10

And later, he writes, In the ideal sense, p erception (im pression ) would then b e the phase o f consciousness that constitutes the pure now, ancl memory, an entirely different phase o f the continuity. But here we are only dealing precisely with an ideal limit, som eth in g abstract which can be nothing by itself. N evertheless, even this ideal now is not som eth in g different toto caelo from the non-now, but on the contrary is in continuous com m erce with it. Ancl the continuous passage o f p erception into primary m em ory cor­ responds to that.11

As soon as we adm it this continuity o f the now and the non-now, o f perception and non-perception in the zone o f originarity that is common to originary im pression and to retention, we w elcom e the oth er into the self-identity o f the Augenblick, non-presence and non-evidentness into the blink of an eye of the instant. T here is a duration to the blink o f an eye and the duration closes the eye. This alterity is even the condi­ tion o f presence, o f presentation, and therefore o f Vorstellung in general, prior to all the dissociations which could be p rodu ced there. T h e dif­ ference between retention and reproduction, between prim ary m em ory and secondary memory, is not the differen ce— not the radical difference that H usserl would w ant— between perception and non-perception, but between two m odifications o f non-perception. W hatever the ph en om ­ enological difference might be between these two m odifications, despite the im m ense problem s that the difference poses and the necessity o f tak­ ing them into account, it separates only two ways o f bein g related to the irreducible non-presence o f an oth er now. This relation to non-presence, once m ore, does not take by surprise, surround, or even dissim ulate the presence o f the originary im pression; it allows its upsurge and its ever reborn virginity. But it radically destroys every possibility o f self-identity in its simplicity. And th at holds for the constituting flow itself at its great­ est depth: If we com pare now the constituting p h en om en a to these constituted uni­ ties, we find a flow, ancl at each phase o f this flow is a continuity of shad­ ing. But in principle it is im possible to display any phase o f this flow in a continuous succession ancl therefore to transform in thought the flow to such an extent that this phase is extended into identity with itself.12

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This intimacy o f non-presence and alterity with presence cuts into, at its root, the argum ent for the uselessness o f the sign in the self-relation. 3. No dou bt H usserl would refuse to assim ilate the necessity o f re­ tention with the necessity o f the sign, since the sign alone belongs, like the im age, to the genus o f re-presentation and symbol. And H usserl can­ not renoun ce this rigorous distinction without putting the axiom atic principium o f phenom enology in question. The vigor with which he sup­ ports the idea that retention and protention belon g to the sphere o f originarity provided that we understand it in a “broad sense,” the insistence with which he opposes the absolute validity o f prim ary m em ory to the relative validity o f secondary memory, " these in deed m anifest his intention and uneasiness. He is uneasy because what is at issue is to save together two apparently irrecon cilable possibilities: (a) the living now is constituted as the absolute perceptual source only in continuity with retention as non-perception. T he faithfulness to experience and to “the things them selves” forbids that the source be constituted in any other way. (b) Since the source o f certainty in gen eral is the originarity o f the living now, it is necessary to m aintain retention in the sphere o f originary certainty and shift the border between originarity and non-originarity

* See, for example, am ong many other analogous texts, appendix 3 to The Phenomenol­ ogy of Internal T ime-Cons cionsn ess: “We have therefore, as essential modes o f the conscious­ ness of time: 1) the ‘sensation’ as presentation, ancl retention and protention interwoven [verflochtene] essentially with it, but which can also become independent (the originary sphere in the large sense); 2) thetic re-presentation (memory), thetic re-presentation of what can accompany or return (anticipation); 3) imaginary re-presentation, as pure imag­ ination, in which we discover all these same modes, in a consciousness that imagines.” Here again, as we have noticed, the nucleus of the pr oblem has the form of the interweaving (Verflechtung) of threads, which phenomenology painstakingly unravels in their essence. This extension of the sphere of originar ity is what allows us to distinguish between the absolute certainty attached to retention and the relative certainty dependent on second­ ary memory and recollection (Wiedererinnerung) in the form of re-presentation. Speaking o f perceptions as archi-livecl-experiences (Urerlebnisse), Husserl writes in Ideas I: “They have in their concretion, more precisely considered, only one, but also always a continuously flowing, absolutely originary phase— the moment of the living now.” He goes on, “Thus, for example, we seize upon the absolute validity o f reflection insofar as it is immanent perce/h tion, that is, pure and simple immanent perception, and more particularly, with respect to what, in its flowing away, it actually makes given originarily; similarly, the absolute validity of retention of something imma nent with respect to what is intended in it in the characteristic of what is ‘still’ living and what has ‘just now’ been, but of course only so far as the content of what is thus characterized reaches. . . . We likewise seize upon the relative validity o f recol­ lection of something im manent” {Ideas I, §78).

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so that it passes, not between the pure p resen t and the non-present, between the actuality and the non-actuality o f a living now, but between two form s of re-turn or o f the re-stitution o f the present, re-tention and re-presentation. W ithout reducin g the abyss that can in fact separate retention from re-presentation, without concealing that the problem o f their relations is nothing other than the history o f “life” and o f life’s becom ing-conscious, we m ust be able to say a priori that their com m on root, the possibility of re-petition in its m ost gen eral form , the trace in the m ost universal sense, is a possibility that not only must inhabit the pure actuality o f the now, but also must constitute it by m eans o f the very m ovem ent o f the différance that the possibility inserts into the pure actuality o f the now.13 Such a trace is, if we are able to hold onto this lan guage w ithout con­ tradicting it and erasing it immediately, m ore “originary” than the ph e­ n om enological originality itself. The ideality o f the form (Form) o f pres­ ence itself implies consequently that it can be repeated to infinity, that its return, as the return o f the sam e, is to infinity necessary an d inscribed in presence as such; that the re-turn is the return o f a present that will be retained in a finite m ovem ent o f retention; that there is originary truth, in the ph en om en ological sense, only insofar as it is enrooted in the fm itude o f this retention; finally that the relation to infinity can be instituted only in the openness to the ideality o f the form o f presence as the possibility o f a re-turn to infinity. W ithout this non-identity to on eself o f so-called originary presen ce, how are we to explain that the possi­ bility o f reflection and o f re-presentation belongs to the essence o f every lived-experience? How are we to explain that reflection belon gs as an ideal and pure freedom to the essen ce o f consciousness? H u sserl con­ stantly em phasizes this fo r reflection in Ideas I f and fo r re-presentation already in The Phenomenology of Internal Time-ConsciousnessΛIn all o f these directions, the presence o f the present is thought beginning from the fold o f the return, beginning from the m ovem ent o f repetition and not the reverse. Does not the fact that this fold in presence or in self-presence is irreducible, that this trace or this différance is always older than presence and obtains for it its openness, forbid us from speaking o f a sim ple selfidentity “im selben A ugenblick”? Does not this fact com prom ise the use

* In particular, see §77, where he raises the problem of the difference ancl of the relations between reflection ancl re-presentation, for example, in secondary memory, t See, for example, §42: “But the ideal possibility of an exactly matching re-presentation of this consciousness cor responds to every present and presenting consciousness.”

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Husserl wants to m ake o f the “solitary life o f the sou l” and consequently the rigorous distribution between indication and expression? Is it not the case that indication and all the concepts from which we have attem pted so far to think it (existence, nature, m ediation, empiricity, etc.) have in the m ovem ent o f transcendental tem poralization an origin that cannot be uprooted? Likewise, is it not the case that all o f what is an n o u n ced in this reduction to the “solitary life o f the so u l” (the transcendental reduc­ tion in all o f its stages and notably the reduction to the m onodological sphere o f the “proper ’— Eigenheit— etc.) is not, as it were, fissured in its possibility by what is called time? It is fissured by what has been called time and to which it would be necessary to give another title, since “tim e” has always designated a m ovem ent th ough t begin n in g from the present an d since “tim e” can say nothing bu t the present. Must we not say that the con cept o f pure solitu d e— and o f the m on ad in the ph en o m en o­ logical sen se— is split open by its own origin, by the very condition o f its self-presence: “tim e” rethought begin n in g from the différanee in auto­ affection, beginning from the identity o f identity and non-identity in the “sam e” o f the im selben Augenblick? H usserl has him self evoked the analogy between the relation to the alter ego such that it is constituted within the absolute m onad o f the ego and the relation to the other (past) presen t such th at it is constituted in the absolute actuality o f the living present {Cartesian Meditations, §52). Is it not the case that this “dialectic”— in all the senses o f this word and p rior to every speculative resum ption o f this con cept— opens living to différance, constituting in the pure im m anence o f lived-experience the hiatus o f indicative com m unication and even o f signification in general? We are in d eed saying the hiatus o f indicative com m unication and of signification in general. For Husserl intends not only to exclude indication from the “solitary life o f the soul.” He will consider language in general, the elem ent o f the logos, in its expressive form itself, as a secondary event, and ad d ed on to an originary and pre-expressive stratum o f sense. Expressive lan guage itself would have to supervene on the absolute silence o f the self:relation.

The Voice That Keeps Silent

P h enom en ological “silen ce” can therefore be reconstituted only by a double exclusion or a double reduction: that o f the relation to the other in me in indicative com m unication, and that of expression as a later stratum , superior to and external to the stratum of sense. The agency o f the voice will m ake its strange authority be heard in the rela­ tion between these two exclusions. L et us at the outset con sider the first reduction, in the form in which it is an n o u n ced in the “essential distinctions,” to which we have taken as a rule to hold ourselves here. Indeed, it is necessary to recognize that the criterion o f the distinction between expression and indication is in the end entrusted to an all too sum m ary description o f “interiorlife”: in this interior life, there would be no indication because there is no com m unication; and there is no com m unication because there is no alter ego. A nd when the secon d person arises in interior language, it is a fiction, and fiction is only fiction. “You have gone wrong, you c a n ’t go on like that” is only a false com m unication, a pretending. L et us not form ulate from the exterior the questions which im pose them selves upon the possibility and the status o f such pretendings or fictions, or upon the place from which this “you” in the m onologue may arise. Let us not pose these questions yet. T heir necessity will be still m ore keen when H usserl will in deed have to note that, besides the “you,” the personal pronoun in gen eral and singularly the “I” are expressions that are “essentially occasion al,” deprived o f “objective sen se,” and function­ ing always as indexicals in actual discourse. The “I” alone achieves its m ean in g in solitary discourse and functions outside o f solitary discourse as a “universally operative indexical.”1 F o r the m om ent, let us ask in what sense an d in view o f what the structure o f interior life is here “sim plified” and in what way the choice o f exam ples is revelatory o f Husser l’s project. It is revelatory at least in two features. 1. T hese exam ples are o f the practical order. In the proposition s chosen, the subject addresses him self to h im self as to a secon d person that he blam es, exhorts, invites to a decision or to a regret. T hat proves, o f course, that we are not d ealin g here with “in dication s.” N othing is shown, directly or indirectly. T he subject learns nothing about himself.

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H is lan guage refers to nothing that “exists.” T h e subject is not inform ed about him self; neither Kundgabe nor Kundnahme are functioning. H us­ serl needs to choose his exam ples within the practical sphere in order to show at once that in them nothing is “in dicated” and that these con­ sist o f false discourses. In fact, we m ight be tem pted to conclude from these exam ples, by supposin g that we are unable to find another genus o f them, that interior discourse is always essentially practical, axiological, or axiopoetic. Even when one says to on eself “you are this way,” is it not the case that the predication involves a valorizing or productive act? But it is precisely this tem ptation that H usserl wants above all and at all costs to avoid. He has always determ ined the m odel o f language in general— indicative as well as expressive— by starting in the theorem. W hatever care he subsequently took to respect the originality o f the practical stratum of sense and expression, whatever then has been the success and rigor o f his analyses, H usserl never stopped asserting the reducibility o f the axiologi­ cal to its logico-theoretical nucleus.'1'- We rediscover here the neces­ sity that drove him to study lan guage from a logical and epistem ological viewpoint, pure gram m ar as pure logical gram m ar that is governed m ore or less im m ediately by the possibility of a relation to the object. A false discourse is a discourse, a contradictory discourse (widersinnig) escapes from non-sense {Unsinnigkeit), only if its gram m aticality does not forbid a m eaning or an intention-of-Bedeutung, which itself can be determ ined only as the aim o f an object. T h erefore we m ust notice that theoretical logicity, the theorem in general, governs not only the determ ination o f expression, o f logical sig­ nification, but also already what is excluded from it, namely, indication, m onstration as Weisen or Zeigen in the Hinweis or the Anzeigen. A n d it is rem arkable that Husserl must, at a certain depth, have recourse to an essential theoretical nucleus of indication in order to be able to exclude it from an expressiv­ ity that is itself purely theoretical Perhaps, at this depth, the determ ination o f expression is contam inated by the very thing that it excludes: pointing the finger at what is in front o f o n e ’s eyes or at what must always be able to ap p ear to an intuition in its visibility, the Zdgen— the relation to the object as indicative m on stration — is invisible only provisionally. The Zeigen is always an intention {Meinen) which pre-determ ines the p rofoun d es­ sential unity between the Anzeigen o f indication and the Hinzeigen o f ex­ pression. And the sign {Zeichen) would always refer, in the last analysis,

* See notably chapter 4 ancl especially §114 to 127 of Ideas I (part 3). We will study them elsewhere more closely and on their own. See “Form and M eaning,” which has already been cited.

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to Zeigen, to the space, to the visibility, to the field and horizon o f what is ob-jected and pro-jected, to phenom enality as vis-à-vis and surface, evi­ dentness or intuition, and first o f all as light. What, then, o f the voice and time? If m onstration is the unity o f gesture and perception in the sign, if signification is attributed to the finger and to the eye, and if this attribution is prescribed to every sign, whether it is indicative or expressive, discursive or non-discursive, what do the voice and time have to do with it? If the invisible is the pro visional, what do the voice and time have to do with it? And why does H usserl make such an effort to separate indication and expression? Does p ron oun cin g or hearing a sign reduce indicative spatiality or indicative mediacy? Let us be patient a bit longer. 2. The exam ple chosen by H usserl (“you have gone wrong, you can ’t go on like that” ) m ust therefore prove two things at once. It must prove on the one hand that this proposition is not indicative (and there­ fore that it is a fictional com m unication); on the other that it provides no knowledge o f the subject to himself. Paradoxically, the proposition is not indicative because, insofar as it is non-theoretical, non-logical, and non-cognitive, it is as well not expressive. T his is why it would be a ph e­ n om enon o f perfectly fictional signification. T hereby the unity o f the Zägen p rior to its diffraction into indication and expression is verified. Now, the temporal modality o f these propositions is not a m atter o f indif­ ference. If these proposition s are not proposition s o f knowledge, this is because they are not im m ediately in the form o f predication. They do not utilize im m ediately the verb “to b e ,” and their sense, if not their gram m atical form , is not in the present. They take note o f a past in the form o f a reproach, an exh ortation to regret som ething and to m ake am ends. The present indicative of the verb “to be” is the pure, teleological form o f the logicity o f expression; or, better, it is the present indicative o f the verb to be in the third person. Even m ore, it is the type o f p rop o si­ tion, “S is P,” in which the S is not a person for which we can replace a personal pron oun , the latter having in all real discourse a value that is solely indicative/' T he subject S m ust be a nam e and a nam e o f an object.

* S e e th e First Logical Investigation, chapter 3, §26: “Every expression, in fact, that includes a personal pronoun lacks an objective sense. The worcl ‘I’ names a different person from case to case. . . . In its case, rather, an indicative function mediates ancl, so to speak, warns the hearer that the one who is in front of you aims at himself.” The whole problem consists in knowing whether in solitary discourse, where, as Husserl says, the Bedeutung of the “I” is fulfilled and accomplished, the element of universality proper to expressivity as such does

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And we know that for H usserl “S is P” is the fundam ental and prim i­ tive form, the originary apoph an tic operation from which every logical proposition must be able to be derived by sim ple com plication.'"’ ’' If one posits the identity o f expression and logical Bedeutung (Ideas I, §124), one must therefore acknowledge that the third “p erso n ” o f the present indicative o f the verb “to b e ” is the irreducible and p u re kern el o f ex­ pression. Husserl was saying, we recall, about an expression, that it was not primitively an “expressing itself,” but from the very beginning it is an “expressin g itself about som eth in g” (über etwas sich auszern, see §7). T h e “speaking to on eself” that here Husserl wants to restore is not a “speakingabout-oneself;-to-oneself,” unless the latter can take the form o f a “speak­ ing to on eself that S is P.” It is here that one must speak, T he sense o f the verb “to b e ” (about which H eidegger tells us that its infinitive form has been enigm atically determ ined by philosophy on the basis o f the third person o f the pres­ ent in d icativ e)1 entertains with the word, that is, with the unity o f the phone and sense, a relation that is entirely singular. U ndoubtedly it is not a “sim ple w ord,” since we can translate it into different languages. But as well it is not a conceptual generality, ΐ Since, however, its sense des­ ignates nothing, no thing, no being nor any ontic determ ination, since

not forbicl this fulfillment ancl dispossesses the subject o f the full intuition of the Bedeutung “I.” As well, we have to know if solitary discourse interrupts or merely interiorizes the situa­ tion of dialogue in which, as Husserl says, “since each person, while speaking o f himself, says ‘I,’ the word has the character o f a universally operative indexical o f this situation.”

Thus we understand better the difference between the manifested which is always subjec­ tive and the expressed as named. Each time that the “I” appears, what is at issue is a proposition of indicative manifestation. The manifested and the named can at times partially overlap (“a glass of water, please” names the thing and manifests the desire), but the two are in prin­ ciple perfectly disjunctive, as in the following example where they are perfectly disjunctive: 2 x 2 = 4. “This statement does not say what is said by ‘I judge that 2 x 2 = 4 / They are not even equivalent statements, since the one can be true when the other is false” (First Logical Investigation, §25). *S e e , in particular, Formal and Transcendental Logic, part 1, chapter 1, §13. f Whether we demonstrate this in the Aristotelian way or in the Heideggerian way, the sense of being must precede the general concept of being. Concerning the singularity of the relation between the word and the sense of being, as well as fo r the problem of the pres­ ent indicative, we refer to Sein und Zeit and to Introduction to Metaphysics. Perhaps it already seems that, while finding support at decisive points in H eidegger’s motives, we would like to wonder whether; in regard to the relations between logos and phone and the claimed ir ­ reducibility of certain unities of words (of the word “being” or other “radical words” ), Hei­ d egg er’s thought at times calls forth the same questions as the metaphysics of presence.

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we en cou n ter it nowhere outside o f the word, its irreducibility is that o f the verbum or o f the legein, that o f the unity o f thought and voice in the logos. T h e privilege o f being can n ot resist the deconstruction o f the word. “B ein g” is the first or the last word to resist the deconstruction o f a lan gu age o f words. But why is verbality m erged with the determ ination o f bein g in gen eral as presence? And why the privilege o f the presen t indicative? Why is the epoch o f the phone the epoch o f being in the form o f presence, that is, in the form o f ideality? It is here that one m ust hear oneself. L et us return to H usserl. Pure expression, logical expression, must be for him an “unproductive” “m e­ d iu m ” that h ap p en s to “reflect” (widerzuspiegeln) the stratum of preexpressive sense.5 Its sole productivity consists in m aking the sense pass into the ideality o f the conceptual and universal form."' A lthough there are essential reasons why the sense is not com pletely repeated in the expression and why the expression involves dep en den t and incom plete significations (syncategorem es, etc.), the telos o f com plete expression is the restoration, in the form o f presence, o f the totality o f a sense actu­ ally given to intuition. Since the sense is determ ined on the basis o f a relation to the object, the m edium o f expression must protect, respect, and restore the presence o f the sense, at once as the being-in-front of the object available to a look, and as the proximity to oneself in interiority. The pre of the present object now-in-front-of is an against (Gegenwart, Gegenstand) at once in the sense o f the up-cigciinst o f proxim ity and the over-cigciinst o f the op-posite. Now between idealization and the voice, the complicity is here un­ failing. An ideal object is an object whose m onstration can be indefinitely repeated, whose presen ce in the 'Lägen is indefinitely reiterable precisely because, freed from all m undane spatiality, it is a pure noem a which I can express without having, at least in appearance, to pass through the world. In this sense, the ph en om en ological voice, which seem s to achieve this operation “in tim e,” does not break with the order o f Zdgen; it belongs to the same system and brings its function to com pletion. The passage to in­ finity in the idealization o f the object is unified with the historial advent o f th e phone? This does not m ean that we are able finally to un derstand what the m ovem ent o f idealization is on the basis o f a determ inate “func­ tion” or “faculty,” concerning which we could know what it is, thanks to the familiarity o f experience, the “phenom enology o f o n e ’s own body,” or an objective science (phonetics, phonology, or physiology o f phona-

* Ideen I, §124.

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tion). On the contrary. T hat the history o f idealization, that is, the “his­ tory o f spirit,” or history as such, is inseparable from the history o f the phone, this inseparability restores to the phone i\s enigm atic potency. In order to really understand that in which the power o f the voice resides, and that in which m etaphysics, philosophy, the determ ination o f being as presen ce are the epoch o f the voice as the technical mastery o f object-being, in order to really understand the unity o f technê and phone, it is necessary to think the objectivity o f the object. T he ideal ob­ je ct is the most objective o f objects; it is in depen den t o f the hic et nunc o f events and o f the acts o f the em pirical subjectivity who intends it. The ideal object can be repeated, to infinity, while rem aining the sam e. Its presence to intuition, its being-in-front-of for the look depen ds essen­ tially on no m undane or em pirical synthesis; the restoration o f its sense in the form o f presence becom es a universal and unlim ited possibility. But its ideal-being is nothing outside of the world; it m ust be constituted, repeated, and exp ressed in a m ed iu m that d oes not im p air the presence and the self-presence o f the acts that intend it: a m edium that preserves at once the presence of the object in front o f the intuition and the presence to oneself, the absolute proxim ity o f the acts to themselves. Since the ideality o f the object is only its being-for a non-em pirical con­ sciousness, it can be expressed only in an elem ent whose phenom enality does not have the form o f mundanity. The voice is the name of this ele­ ment. The voice hears itself. Phonic signs (“acoustic im ages” in S au ssu re’s sense, the p h en om en ological voice) are “h eard ” by the subject who ut­ ters them in the absolute proxim ity o f their present. The subject does not have to pass outside o f h im self in ord er to be im m ediately affected by its activity o f expression. My w ords are “alive” because they seem not to leave me, seem not to fall outside o f m e, outside o f my breath, into a visible distance; they do not stop belon gin g to me, to be at my disposal, “without anything accessory.” In any case, in this way, the ph en om enon o f the voice, the ph en om en ological voice, is given. Som eon e will object perhaps th at this interiority belongs to the p h en om en ological an d ideal side o f every signifier. For exam ple, the ideal fo rm o f a written signi­ fier is not in the world, and the distinction between graphem e and the em pirical body o f the co rresp on d in g graphic sign separates an inside o f ph en om en ological consciousness and an outside o f the world. And that is true o f every visible or spatial signifier. O f course. Nevertheless every non-phonetic signifier involves, right within its “p h en o m e n o n ,” within the (non-m undane) ph en om en ological sphere o f experience in which it is given, a spatial reference; the sense o f “outside,” “in the w orld” is an essential com pon en t o f its ph en om en on. In appearance, there is nothing like that in the ph en om en on o f the voice. Within phenom eno-

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logical interiority, hearin g on eself and seein g on eself are two orders o f the self-relation that are radically d ifferen t/E v en before a description o f this difference is sketched, we un derstand why the hypothesis o f the “m o n o lo g u e” could authorize the distinction between indication and expression only by assum ing an essential connection between expression and the phone. Between the phonic elem ent (in the p h en o m en o­ logical sense and not in the sense of intra-m undane sonority) and expres­ sivity, that is, the logicity of a signifier animated in view o f the ideal pres* ence o f a Bedeutung (which is itself related to an object), there would be a necessary connection. H usserl cannot bracket what the glossem aticians call the “substance o f exp ression ” without threatening his entire project.7 T h e appeal to this substance plays therefore a m ajor philosophical role. L et us th erefore attem pt to in terrogate the p h en o m en ological value o f the voice, the transcendence o f its dignity in relation to every other signifying substance. We think and we are trying to show that this transcendence is only apparen t. But this “ap p earan ce” is the very essence o f consciousness and its history, and it determ ines an epoch to which the philosophical idea o f truth, the opposition o f truth and appearan ce, such as it still functions in phenom enology, belongs. We can therefore neither call it “a p p e a ra n c e ” n or nam e it within m etaphysical co n cep ­ tuality. We can n ot attem pt to decon struct this tran scen den ce without p lu n gin g in, and grop in g ou r way through inherited concepts, toward the unnam eable. The “ap p aren t tran scen den ce” of the voice, therefore, is based on the fact that the signified, which is always essentially ideal, the “expressed” Bedeutung, is im m ediately presen t to the act o f expression. This im m e­ diate presen ce is based on the fact that the ph en om en ological “body” o f the signifier seem s to erase itself in the very m om ent it is produced. From this point on, it seem s to belon g to the elem en t o f ideality. It re­ duces itself phenom enologically and transform s the m undane opacity o f its body into pure diaphaneity. This erasure o f the sensible body and o f its exteriority is for consciousness the very form o f the im m ediate presence o f the signified. Why is the ph onem e the m ost “id e al” o f signs? W here does this complicity between soun d and ideality, or rath er between voice and id e­ ality, com e from ? (H egel h ad been m ore attentive to this complicity than anyone else; and from the viewpoint o f the history o f metaphysics, this is a rem arkable fact that we shall in terrogate elsew here).8 When I speak, it belongs to the p h en om en ological essence o f this operation that I hear myself during the time that I speak. The signifier that is anim ated by my breath and by the intention o f signification (in H usserlian language the expression anim ated by the Bedeutungsintention) is absolutely close to

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me. The living act, the act that gives life, the Lebendigkeit that anim ates the body o f the signifier and transform s it into an expression that wants to say, the soul o f language, seems not to separate itself from itself, from its presence to itself. The soul of lan guage does not risk death in the body o f a signifier aban don ed to the world and to the visibility o f space. T h e soul can show the ideal object or the ideal Bedeutung, which relates to it, with­ out venturing outside o f ideality, outside o f the interiority o f life present to itself. The system o f Zeigen, the m ovem ents o f the fin ger and the eye (abou t which we were w ondering earlier if those m ovem ents were not inseparable from phenom enality) are not absent here; they are internal­ ized. T he p h en om en on does n ot stop bein g an object fo r the voice. On the contrary, insofar as the ideality o f the object seem s to d epen d on the voice and thus becom es absolutely available in it, the system that connects phenom enality to the possibility o f Zeigen functions better than ever in the voice. The phoneme gives itself as the mastered ideality of the phenomenon. This presence to itself o f the anim ating act in the transparent spiri­ tuality o f what it anim ates, this intimacy o f life to itself, which has always led us to say that speech is alive, all o f this assum es therefore that the speaking subject hears h im self in the present. Such is the essence or the norm alcy o f speech. It is im plied in the very structure o f speech that the speaker hear himself: that he at once perceive the sensible fo rm o f the ph on em es and u n derstan d his own intention o f expression. If ac­ cidents arise, which seem to contradict this teleological necessity, either they are surm ounted by som e supplem en tin g operation or there will be no speech. B ein g d u m b and bein g d e af go together. T h e d e a f can partici­ pate in colloquy only by slippin g his actions into the form o f words whose telos entails that they are heard by the one who utters them. Considered from a purely ph en om en ological viewpoint, within the reduction, the process o f speech has the originality o f being already d e ­ livered as a pure ph en om en on , having already suspen ded the natural at­ titude and the existential thesis o f the world. The operation o f “hearingoneself-speak” is an auto-affection o f an absolutely unique type. On the one hand, it operates in the m edium o f universality. The signifieds which ap p ear in it m ust be idealities that we m u st idealiter be able to repeat or transmit indefinitely as the sam e. On the other hand, the subject is able to hear him self or speak to himself, is able to let h im self be affected by the signifier that he produces without any detou r through the agency o f ex ­ teriority, o f the world, or o f the non-proper in general. Every other form o f auto-affection must either pass through the non-proper or renounce universality. When I see myself, regardless o f whether it occurs because a lim ited area o f my body is given to my look or it occurs by m eans o f a specular reflection, the non-proper is already there in the field of this

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auto-affection which th ereafter is no lon ger pure. It is the sam e thing in the experience o f touching-touched. In th e two cases, the surface o f my body, as a relation to exteriority, m ust begin by exp o sin g itself in the world. Are there not, som eon e will say, form s o f pure auto-affection which, in the interiority o f o n e ’s own body, do not require the interven­ tion o f any m undane exhibitive surface and yet are not of the order o f the voice? But then these form s rem ain purely em pirical; they cannot b e­ long to a m edium of universal signification. It is necessary therefore, in o rd er to give an account o f the p h en om en ological power o f the voice, to specify this concept o f pure auto-affection and describe what in it makes it p ro p er to universality. Insofar as it is pure auto-affection, the opera­ tion o f hearing-oneself-speak seem s to reduce even the internal surface o f o n e ’s own body. In its ph en om en on , it seem s to be able to do with­ out this exteriority within interiority, to do without this internal space in which o u r experience or o u r im age o f o n e ’s own body is stretched out. This is why h earing-oneself:speak is lived as absolutely pure auto­ affection, in a proxim ity to self which would be nothing other than the absolute reduction o f space in general. It is this purity that m akes it apt for universality. R equirin g the intervention o f no determ inate surface in the world, producing itself in the world as an auto-affection that is pure, it is an absolutely available signifying substance. For the voice encounters no obstacle to its em ission in the world precisely insofar as it produces itself there as pure auto-affection. U n doubtedly this auto-affection is the possibility o f what we call subjectivity or the for-itself, but without it no w orld would ap p ear as such. For, in its depth, the voice assum es the unity o f the soun d (which is in the w orld) an d the phone (in the p h en o m ­ enological sense). An objective “m u n d an e” science can surely teach us nothing about the essence o f the voice. But the unity o f the sound and the voice, which allows the voice to p rodu ce itself in the w orld as pure auto-affection, is the unique instance that escapes from the distinction between intram undanity an d transcendentality; and by the sam e token, it m akes this distinction possible. It is this universality that results in the fact that, structurally and in principle, no consciousness is possible without the voice. T he voice is being close to itself in the form o f universality, as con-sciousness. The voice is consciousness. In colloquy, the propagation o f signifiers seem s to encounter no obstacle because it puts two phenomenological origins o f pure auto-affection in relation. To speak to som eone is undoubtedly to hear on eself speak, to be heard by oneself, but also and by the sam e to­ ken, if one is heard by the other, it is to m ake the other repeat immediately in h im self the hearing-oneself:speak in the very form in which I have p rod u ced it. R epeat it im m ediately, that is, repro du ce the pure auto-

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affection without the aid o f any exteriority. This possibility of reproduc­ tion, whose structure is absolutely unique, gives itself as the ph en om enon of an unlim ited m astery or an unlim ited power over the signifier, since the latter has the form o f non-exteriority itself. Ideally in the teleological essence o f speech, it would therefore be possible that the signifier be absolutely near to the signified intended by intuition and guiding the m eaning. T he signifier w ould becom e perfectly diap h an ous by reason o f the absolute proxim ity o f the signified. This proxim ity is broken, how­ ever, when, instead of h earin g myself speak, I see myself write or signify by gestures. H usserl will be able to con sider the m edium of expression as “un­ productive” and “reflective” precisely on the condition o f this absolute proxim ity o f the signifier to the signified, and on the condition o f the sign ifier’s erasure in im m ediate presence. Also, on this condition, H usserl will be able, paradoxically, to reduce the m edium with no harm bein g done and assert that a pre-expressive stratum o f sense exists. O n this condition too H usserl will give h im self the right to reduce the totality o f language, regardless o f w hether it is indicative or expressive, in order to regain the possession o f the originarity o f sense. How are we to un d erstan d this red u ction o f lan guage in light o f the fact that H usserl, from the Logical Investigations up to “T h e O rigin o f Geom etry,” continues to con sider there to be scientific truths, that is, absolutely ideal objects, only in “statem ents”? How are we to understand this reduction when he continued to think o f not only spoken language but also inscription as indispensable for the constitution o f ideal objects, that is, o f objects that can b e transm itted and repeated as the sam e? First o f all, one needs to recogn ize this: although the m ovem ent that results in “T he O rigin o f G eom etry” was started lon g before, in its m ost obvious aspect it confirm s the p rofoun d way in which lan guage is lim ited to a secondary stratum o f experience, and, in the consideration o f this secondary stratum , it confirm s the traditional ph on ologism o f metaphysics. If writing com pletes the constitution o f ideal objects, it does this only insofar as it is phonetic w riting.1' Writing com es to stabilize, in­ scribe, < 9 1> write down, incarnate a speech that is already prepared. And to reactivate writing is always to reawaken an expression within an indica­ tion, a word in the body o f a letter which was carrying in it the threat of

* It is strange that, despite the for malist motif ancl the Leibnizian fidelity that he asserts from one end of his work to the other, Husserl has never placed the problem of writing at the center o f his reflections, nor does he, in “The Origin of Geometry,” take account of the difference between phonetic writing and non-phonetic writing.

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the crisis, insofar as the letter was a symbol that can always rem ain empty. Speech was already playing the sam e role in regard to the identity o f sense such as it is first constituted in thought. For exam ple, the “protogeom eter” m ust produce in thought, by means o f a passage to the limit, the pure ideality o f the geom etrical object, by securing its transmissibility by speech and then entrusting it to a writing by m eans o f which som eone will be able to rep eat the originative sense, that is, the act o f pure thought which created the ideality o f the sense. With the possibility o f progress that such an incarnation authorizes, the risk o f “forgetfuln ess” and o f loss o f the sense grows constantly. It is m ore and m ore difficult to reconstitute the presence o f the act that is buried under historical sedim entations. The m om ent o f the crisis is always that o f the sign. M oreover, despite the m eticulousness, the rigor, and the absolute novelty o f his analyses, H usserl always describes all o f these m ovem ents in m etaphysical con cep­ tuality. The absolute difference between the soul and the body is what governs. W riting is a body that expresses only if we actually pron oun ce the verbal expression that anim ates it, if its space is tem poralized. The word is a body that m eans som ething only if an actual intention anim ates it and m akes it pass from the state o f inert sonority (Körper) to the state o f anim ated body (Leib). This body p rop er o f the word expresses only if it is anim ated (sinnbelebt) by the act o f a wanting-to-say (bedeuten) which transform s it into spiritual flesh (geistige Leiblichkeit). But only Geistigkeit or Leiblichkeit is in depen den t and originary/' 9 As such, Geistigkeit needs no signifier in order to be present to itself. It is as much against its signifiers as thanks to them that Geistigkeit is awakened and m aintained in life. Such is the traditional side o f H u sserl’s discourse. B u t if H usserl h ad to acknow ledge, even as salutary threats, the necessity o f these “incarn ation s,” this is because a profoun d motive was torm enting and contesting, from within, the security of these tradi­ tional distinctions. Because too the possibility o f writing was inhabiting the inside o f speech which itself was at work in the intimacy o f thought. And here we return to all the resources o f originary non-presence whose outcrop we have already located several times. Even though he represses difference by pushing it back into the exteriority o f the signi­ fier, Husserl could not fail to recognize its work at the origin o f sense and o f presence. Auto-affection as the operation o f the voice assum ed that a pure difference cam e to divide self:presence. The possibility o f everything that we believe we are able to exclu de from auto-affection is enrooted in this pure difference: space, the outside, the world, the body, etc. As soon

See the introduction to “The Origin of Geometry,” §7.

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as we adm it that auto-affection is the condition of self-presence, no pure transcendental reduction is possible. But it is necessary to pass through the reduction in order to recapture the difference in closest proximity to itself: not to its identity, nor its purity, nor its origin. It has none o f these. But in closest proxim ity to the m ovem ent o f différance. This m ovem ent o f différance does not supervene upon a transcen­ dental subject. The m ovem ent o f différance produces the transcenden­ tal subject. Auto-affection is not a m odality o f experience that character­ izes a being that would already be itself (autos). Auto-affection produces the sam e as the self:relation in the difference with itself, the sam e as the non-identical. Shall we say that the auto-affection about which we have been speak­ ing so far concerns only the operation o f the voice, that the difference concerns the ord er o f the phonic “signifier” or the “secondary stratum ” o f expression? Shall we say that we can always reserve the possibility o f a pure and purely self:present identity at the level that Husserl wanted to open up, the level o f pre-expressive lived-experience, the level of sense insofar as it p receded Bedeutung and expression? But it w ould be easy to show that such a possibility is excluded at the very root o f transcendental experience. In fact, why is the con cept o f auto-affection im posed on us? T h e originality o f speech, that by which speech is distinguished from every other m ilieu o f signification, com es from the way its fabric seems to be purely tem poral. And this tem porality does not unfold a sense that would be itself timeless. Even p rio r to being expressed, the sense is through and through tem poral. The om nitem porality o f ideal objects, according to Husserl, is only a m ode o f temporality. And when H usserl describes a sense that seem s to escape from temporality, he hastens to specify that what is at issue in it is a provisional stage o f the analysis and that he is considering a constituted temporality. Now as soon as we take account o f the m ovem ent o f tem poralization, such as it is already described in The Phenomenology of Inter nal Time-Consciousness, it is indeed necessary to use the concept o f pure auto-affection, the con cept that H eidegger uses, as we know, in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics precisely in regard to tim e.10 The “source-point,” the “originary im pression,” that on the basis o f which the m ovem ent o f tem poralization is produ ced is already pure auto-affection. First, it is a pure produ ction since tem porality is never a real predicate o f a being. T he intuition o f time itself cannot be em ­ pirical. It is a reception that receives nothing. The absolute novelty of each now is therefore en gen d ered by nothing. It consists in an origi­ nary im pression that engen ders itself: “T he originary im pression is the * absolute beginning o f this production, the originary source, that start-

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in g from which all the rest is continuously produced. But it itself is not produced. It is not born as som ething produced, but by genesis spontanea, it is originary g en eratio n .” 11 This pure spontaneity is an im pression. It creates nothing. The new now is n ot a being, is n ot an object produced, and every language fails to describe this pure m ovem ent except by m eans o f m etaphor, that is, by borrow ing its concepts from the order o f objects o f experience that this tem poralization m akes possible. Husserl constantly warns us against these m etaphors." The process by m eans o f which the living now, p rod u cin g itself by spontaneous generation,

* See, for example, the admirable §36 o f The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, which demonstrates the absence of a proper name for this strange “movement,” which moreover is not a movement. “For all of that,” Husserl concludes, “names fail us.” We would still have to radicalize H usserl’s intention here in a specific direction. For it is no accident if he still designates this unnameable as “absolute subjectivity,” that is, as a being thought by starting from presence as substance, ousia, hypokeimenon: a self-iclentical being in self-presence, the self-presence making a subject out of the substance. What is saicl to be unnameable in this section is not literally som ething about which we know that it is a being that is present in the form o f self-presence, a substance modified into a subject, into the absolute subject, whose self-presence is pure ancl depends on no external affection, on no outside. All of that is present and we can name it; its proof is that we cannot put into question the being possessed by absolute subjectivity. What are unnameable, according to Husserl, are only the “absolute properties” o f this subject, which is therefore indeed designated according to the classical metaphysical schema that distinguishes the substance (the present being) from its attributes. Another schema that keeps the incomparable depth of analysis within the closure of the metaphysics o f presence is the subject-object opposition. This being for whom the “absolute proper ties” are indescribable is present as absolute subjectivity, is a being that is absolutely present and absolutely present to itself, only in its opposition to the object. The object is relative; the subject is absolute: “We are unable to express this in any other way than: we describe this flow in this way according to what is constit uted, but it consists in nothing that is temporally ‘objective.’ This is absolute subjectivity, and it has the absolute properties of something that we have to designate metaphorically as ‘flow,’ something that springs up ‘now,’ in a point o f actuality, an originary source-point, etc. In the lived-experience o f actuality, we have the originary source-point anci a continuity of moments of retentions. For all o f that, names fail us” (The Phenomenology of Interned TimeConsciousness, §36, my em phasis).