The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy Review

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The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy ReviewDerrida deconstructs the simultaneous, yet not so simultaneous, process of logic and empirical sense. The point here is that of the birth of absolute knowledge, and Derrida shows that logic is a constitution of knowledge just as empirical sense. One can not begin without the other, so both supplement each other. Derrida shows that by reducing one, the other cannot proceed being without the other (i.e., genesis of knowledge, language, or consciousness). The contradiction that Husserl makes is that he keeps revolving back to an intention or intuition that prevents the subject (i.e., the human) from being seen as the object. Without objectivity, the philosophical horizon cannot be seen for what it really is, and if the subject is able to make any intention then obviously we haven't reached the genesis.
Even though Derrida hadn't coined a lot of his terms here, his thinking behind Deconstruction is there for the reader. This is a really good book to begin in order to understand what is in his later writings. I recommend Derrida's Origin of Geometry, Grammatology, and Speech and Phenomena after reading The Problem of Genesis.
I think a reader who has read much of his more modern works will see that Derrida's thinking is consistent up until his last works after reading this.The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy OverviewDerrida's first book-length work, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy, was originally written as a dissertation for his diplôme d'études supérieures in 1953 and 1954. Surveying Husserl's major works on phenomenology, Derrida reveals what he sees as an internal tension in Husserl's central notion of genesis, and gives us our first glimpse into the concerns and frustrations that would later lead Derrida to abandon phenomenology and develop his now famous method of deconstruction.For Derrida, the problem of genesis in Husserl's philosophy is that both temporality and meaning must be generated by prior acts of the transcendental subject, but transcendental subjectivity must itself be constituted by an act of genesis. Hence, the notion of genesis in the phenomenological sense underlies both temporality and atemporality, history and philosophy, resulting in a tension that Derrida sees as ultimately unresolvable yet central to the practice of phenomenology.Ten years later, Derrida moved away from phenomenology entirely, arguing in his introduction to Husserl's posthumously published Origin of Geometry and his own Speech and Phenomena that the phenomenological project has neither resolved this tension nor expressly worked with it. The Problem of Genesis complements these other works, showing the development of Derrida's approach to phenomenology as well as documenting the state of phenomenological thought in France during a particularly fertile period, when Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Tran-Duc-Thao, as well as Derrida, were all working through it. But the book is most important in allowing us to follow Derrida's own development as a philosopher by tracing the roots of his later work in deconstruction to these early critical reflections on Husserl's phenomenology."A dissertation is not merely a prerequisite for an academic job. It may set the stage for a scholar's life project. So, the doctoral dissertations of Max Weber and Jacques Derrida, never before available in English, may be of more than passing interest. In June, the University of Chicago Press will publish Mr. Derrida's dissertation, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy, which the French philosopher wrote in 1953-54 as a doctoral student, and which did not appear in French until 1990. From the start, Mr Derrida displayed his inventive linguistic style and flouting of convention."—Danny Postel, Chronicle of Higher Education

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Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Religion and Postmodernism Series) Review

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Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Religion and Postmodernism Series) ReviewArchive Fever - A Freudian Impression is the text of a lecture given by Jacques Derrida at the Freud Museum in London during an international colloquium entitled "Memory: The Question of Archives" organized by the Société Internationale d'Histoire de la Psychiatrie et de la Psychanalyse. The location, the theme of the conference, the title of the lecture, the list of persons present and absent: all matters enormously for the understanding of this text, which highlights a decisive aspect of Derrida's thought.
Freud's last house after he flew to London in 1938 became a museum after his daughter Anna passed away in 1982. It shelters part of Freud's personal archives, his library, his daughter's papers, and a research center on the history of psychoanalysis.
To paraphrase Derrida, Freud's house is used as a scene of domiciliation: it gives shelter, it assigns to residence, and it consigns, as it gathers together signs. As a place for archives [the word comes from the Greek arkheion, the residence of the superior magistrate], it is at once institutive and conservative. "It has the force of law, of a law which is the law of the house," writes Derrida. The archivization produces as much as it records the event. It opens "the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow". In the case of psychoanalysis, the conservation of archives raises specific questions: "What is this new science of which the institutional and theoretical archive ought by rights to comprise the most private documents, sometimes secret?" asks Derrida.
But the House of Freud is also the place of a lineage: that of the father of psychoanalysis, whom all analysts claim as ancestor, and also the lineage of an individual who was taken in his own web of kinship relationships, in particular with his father Jakob and with his daughter Anna. The private library contains a Philippsohn Bible that Sigmund Freud had studied in his youth and that his father, having rebound the volume in "a new skin", gave him back on his thirty-fifth birthday, inscribed with a personal dedication in Hebrew.
It may be possible to read into the text of the dedication an allusion to Freud's circumcision, although the point is a matter of debate. But the gift of the father refers unambiguously to Freud's Jewish heritage: as a child Sigmund Freud had been "deeply engrossed" in the reading of the Bible, and as an adult he was still able to decipher his father's handwritten inscription in Hebrew, which renewed the covenant passed when the Book was first given.
This question of deferred obedience to the father, and of allegiance to the Law, was also taken up by Freud's daughter Anna. In 1977, she was invited by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to inaugurate an endowed chair carrying the name of her long dead father. Unable to go, she sent a written statement which acknowledges, among other things, that the accusation according to which psychoanalysis is a "Jewish science", "under present circumstances, can serve as a title of honour."
This is the main point Derrida wants to get at. It has now become difficult to discuss Freud and psychoanalysis without any reference to Judaism. Freud, of course, vehemently denied the notion of a Jewish science, and he emphasized the universal (non-Jewish) essence of psychoanalysis, although he sometimes hinted--in the private archives unearthed by historians--the influence of his Judaism or Jewishness over the elaboration of the new science.
This debate was forcefully addressed by the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in his Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. Yerushalmi, who "discovered" the Hebrew dedication in Freud's Bible, is the absentee to which Derrida's lecture is addressed. Indeed, the whole text could have been condensed in the two words of a dedication, a "To Yerushalmi" that would also have echoed the greetings that Jews exchange at the Passover Seder and at Yom Kippur.
As Yerushalmi himself notes, the notion of a Jewish science will very much depend on how the very terms Jewish and science are to be defined. Derrida remarks that "only the future of science, in particular that of psychoanalysis, will say whether this science is Jewish, because it will tell us what science is and what Jewishness is." Following Yerushalmi, Derrida posits that if Judaism is terminable, Jewishness is interminable: it is "precisely the waiting of the future, the opening of a relation to the future, the experience of the future" as an event radically to come. In other words, it is "the affirmation of affirmation, the yes to the originary yes" that deconstructionist theologians like John Caputo sum up as a double "oui-oui".
But to Derrida the question of Freud's relation to Judaism also covers a more personal aspect. He refers in a parenthesis to himself as "I who have not only a father named Hayim, but also, as if by chance, a grandfather named Moses. And another, Abraham." He mentions several times the issue of circumcision, "that singular and immemorial archive called circumcision", adding that "this is not just any example for me". And he confesses that in addressing a colleague on the issue of Freud and Judaism, "I am speaking of myself."
There are other themes addressed in the text: the issue of ghosts, addressed at length in Specters of Marx but that Derrida revisits by noting that Freud also "had his ghosts"; the link between history and psychoanalysis, or between psychoanalysis and any discipline, as no discipline can escape, deny or repress the "Freudian impression". We even learn in passing that Derrida was the proud owner of a portable Macintosh computer. And of course, there is the style, the inimitable verb of Derrida, which is beautifully rendered by the translator. This short volume is a worthwhile addition to the Derridean corpus.Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Religion and Postmodernism Series) OverviewIn Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida deftly guides us through an extended meditation on remembrance, religion, time, and technology—fruitfully occasioned by a deconstructive analysis of the notion of archiving. Intrigued by the evocative relationship between technologies of inscription and psychic processes, Derrida offers for the first time a major statement on the pervasive impact of electronic media, particularly e-mail, which threaten to transform the entire public and private space of humanity. Plying this rich material with characteristic virtuosity, Derrida constructs a synergistic reading of archives and archiving, both provocative and compelling."Judaic mythos, Freudian psychoanalysis, and e-mail all get fused into another staggeringly dense, brilliant slab of scholarship and suggestion."—The Guardian"[Derrida] convincingly argues that, although the archive is a public entity, it nevertheless is the repository of the private and personal, including even intimate details."—Choice"Beautifully written and clear."—Jeremy Barris, Philosophy in Review"Translator Prenowitz has managed valiantly to bring into English a difficult but inspiring text that relies on Greek, German, and their translations into French."—Library Journal

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The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s Review

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The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s ReviewA very favorable review from Julian Jackson in the Guardian:
In a notorious speech during the 2007 presidential election campaign, Nicolas Sarkozy lambasted the "legacy of 1968" in France for having ushered in "intellectual and moral relativism". This opportunistic gesture towards the conservative electorate was rather surprising since no politician with Sarkozy's tumultuous private life would have had any chance of being elected president without the liberalisation of moral attitudes that occurred in France after May '68. To confuse matters further, once he had been elected, Sarkozy chose as foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, founder of Médecins sans Frontières, who had been an activist in 1968 and sees himself as faithful to the values of that year.
What this shows is that the legacy of '68 remains hotly debated in France, and this readable book by the American academic Richard Wolin is an important contribution to that debate. If people tend to remember May '68 nowadays in terms of sexual liberalisation, at the time protesters spoke the language of Marxism, and Wolin focuses on one particularly radical Marxist group - the French Maoists - whose heyday was the period 1967-73. This might seem a somewhat narrow subject until we remember that the supporters of the Maoists included such luminaries as Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre (who had nothing else in common).
This was a time when the language of politics was extraordinarily violent. André Glucksmann, now one of the anti-totalitarian "new philosophers" of whom the most famous is Bernard-Henri Lévy, believed in his Maoist phase that France was a fascist country; Sartre called for popular tribunals to counteract bourgeois justice. Not to be outdone, Foucault advocated a "people's justice" without courts on the lines of the September massacres of 1792.
Curiously the Maoists had missed out on 1968 itself. Blinded by dogmatism, they assumed that an event led by students could not be serious. It must be a plot hatched by de Gaulle and the French state as a pretext to crush the proletariat. This complete contradiction between the reality on the streets and what theory said must be happening caused one Maoist leader, Robert Linhart, to have a nervous breakdown. After May 1968, they tried to make up for lost time, and achieved notoriety when de Gaulle's successor, Georges Pompidou (ignoring de Gaulle's wise maxim regarding Sartre: "you do not arrest Voltaire"), arrested two of their leaders and outlawed their newspaper. Suddenly they become a cause célèbre. The Rolling Stones even interrupted a Paris concert in 1970 to allow a French Maoist to address the audience.
Sartre's flirtation with the Maoists is especially interesting. In the 60s, Sartre's philosophy of political engagement had been eclipsed by the fashion for structuralism, which abolished agency and the "subject". Structuralism was potentially fatalistic about the prospects for political change: "structures do not take to the streets", observed the philosopher Lucien Goldmann. Then in 1968 "events" suddenly asserted themselves after all. Sartre was the only member of the intellectual old guard to be invited to address the students in the occupied Sorbonne. What attracted Sartre to the Maoists - and vice versa - was their energy, anger, voluntarism and moral outrage.
For others Maoism was merely a question of opportunism. Wolin has a chapter on the Maoist flirtation of the literary journal Tel Quel, whose editor, Philippe Sollers, has jumped on every political bandwagon (though always a little late). In the 1960s he supported art for art's sake in the form of the hermetic new novel, then moved to Stalinism, then Maoism, until finally in 1978 he called for a vote for the centrist Giscard d'Estaing. The Tel Quel group visited China in 1974 and were enthused by what they saw. When a repentant French Maoist later said to his former Chinese guide that he had been shown only the positive side of communism, the response was: "we showed you what you wanted to see." Julia Kristeva, one of that group, was so taken by China that she praised the barbaric practice of binding women's feet as an example of the power of Chinese women. My only complaint about Wolin's book is that he spends too much time on Kristeva, who perfectly exemplifies the capacity of intelligent people to write nonsense in impenetrable prose.
There are no Maoists left now except for the unrepentant - but now bizarrely fashionable - philosopher Alain Badiou, who is still willing to defend the Khmer Rouge with Mao's chilling comment "the revolution is not a dinner party". But Wolin's book is not just about a strange few years of political folly. He argues that by a process of unintended consequences Maoism allowed a generation of French political activists to rediscover the language of human rights. This is not a totally original argument, but Wolin expounds it effectively. The Maoists might live with "China in our heads", as the saying went, but their political activism also caused them to explore what French society was really like.
Following Mao's dictum that "one must get down from the horse in order to pluck the flower", many idealistic young Maoist radicals went to work in factories. In the same spirit Foucault helped to found the Prison Information Group (GIP) to investigate and denounce the conditions in French prisons. This experience led him to substitute Sartre's idea of the all-knowing "universal" intellectual with that of the "specific" intellectual who comments only on concrete cases that he knows about. In another curious twist of history, it was through a Maoist-influenced group called Vive la Révolution that homosexual liberation first entered French radical politics in 1971.
For Wolin, then, if France is today less authoritarian than it once was, with a more active associative life where many people are engaged in causes such as the defence of sans-papiers - illegal immigrants - that is one of the legacies of the strange Maoist moment. If that's true, no wonder Sarkozy dislikes May '68 so much.
The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s Overview
Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Julia Kristeva, Phillipe Sollers, and Jean-Luc Godard. During the 1960s, a who's who of French thinkers, writers, and artists, spurred by China's Cultural Revolution, were seized with a fascination for Maoism. Combining a merciless expos of left-wing political folly and cross-cultural misunderstanding with a spirited defense of the 1960s, The Wind from the East tells the colorful story of this legendary period in France. Richard Wolin shows how French students and intellectuals, inspired by their perceptions of the Cultural Revolution, and motivated by utopian hopes, incited grassroots social movements and reinvigorated French civic and cultural life.

Wolin's riveting narrative reveals that Maoism's allure among France's best and brightest actually had little to do with a real understanding of Chinese politics. Instead, it paradoxically served as a vehicle for an emancipatory transformation of French society. French student leftists took up the trope of "cultural revolution," applying it to their criticisms of everyday life. Wolin examines how Maoism captured the imaginations of France's leading cultural figures, influencing Sartre's "perfect Maoist moment"; Foucault's conception of power; Sollers's chic, leftist intellectual journal Tel Quel; as well as Kristeva's book on Chinese women--which included a vigorous defense of foot-binding.

Recounting the cultural and political odyssey of French students and intellectuals in the 1960s, The Wind from the East illustrates how the Maoist phenomenon unexpectedly sparked a democratic political sea change in France.


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