An Event, Perhaps. Peter Salmon
behind the apple tree I perceive, inaccessible to me and all human perception, always and forever. In fact, the apple tree exists ‘for consciousness’ and ‘beyond that is nothing’.21
Husserl is thus trying to get to what he would term our pre-predicative (also called antepredicative) experience of the world. This is an originary moment where we are in the world, experiencing it before categories, before classifications, certainly before philosophical speculation. Hence his battle cry, ‘to the things themselves’, unmediated by conceptual baggage: immediate presence, timeless, uncontaminated by history.
Jackie spent the summer of 1953, back in El-Biar, immersed in a Paul Ricoeur translation of Ideas I. Then in January 1954 he was granted access to the Husserl Archives in Louvain, Belgium, where he studied Husserl’s vast corpus of unpublished manuscripts, smuggled out of Nazi Germany in 1938. This included more than 45,000 shorthand pages, his complete research library and 10,000 pages of typescripts. It was during this visit that Jackie encountered the short text The Origin of Geometry, the translation of which would be his first book.
The weeks that Jackie spent at the Husserl Archive deepened his fascination with the thinker. While he was glad to return to Paris, the trip had had a decisive effect, and he threw himself immediately into his dissertation, ‘The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy’, churning out in only a few months some 300 pages of dense, confident, interrogative prose.
In his introduction to the text, published thirty-seven years later, Derrida was astonished, as many other readers have been, to find that in style, voice and concerns, the mature thinker was more than recognisable in the twenty-four-year-old writing his first sustained work of philosophy. He noted ‘an originary complication of the origin… an initial contamination of the simple.’ The dissertation ‘even in its literal formation’ determined everything he had written since.22
Jackie’s main concern in the dissertation is to do, as the title suggests, with the idea of ‘origin’. This is not ‘the beginning’ (although it is that too), but the moment of apprehension on which Husserl’s phenomenology depends. It is this moment of apprehension which phenomenology sets out to describe. To describe it, we must in some sense make time stand still. This is okay as a thought experiment. But time does not stand still. Every moment contains a temporal as well as a spatial thingness – a genesis. Suspend it if you like, but don’t then say that what you are presenting is a true description. Derrida’s dissertation essentially works through Husserl’s corpus identifying moments where it collapses under the weight of this tension between the spatial and the temporal.
Derrida’s insight was not completely original, although where he went with it was. In fact, it was a fellow alumnus of the ENS who had first identified a similar problem, the impossibility of a pre-conceptual originary moment, secured against time and history. Tran Duc Thao was born in French Indochina, in 1917. Studying under Maurice Merleau-Ponty at the ENS, he later became an anticolonialist, and was jailed in 1945 by the French government. In 1951, at the invitation of the new communist government, he returned to what was now Vietnam, becoming dean of History in the country’s first national university. By 1956 Thao had fallen out with the ruling party, criticising the land reforms that had led to large numbers of deaths. Forced to publish two self-criticisms in the official newspaper of the Party, he was stripped of his deanship. Spending the next thirty years in the provinces translating philosophy texts into Vietnamese, he eventually returned to France in the 1980s, dying in poverty in an apartment in the Vietnamese Embassy in 1993.
In 1951 he had published Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, a work of sustained brilliance which was hugely influential at the ENS – around half the papers that year which mentioned Husserl referenced Thao, ‘unheard of for the author of a secondary work.’23 Thao regarded the Husserlian method as a decisive step in Western philosophy. However, as with Derrida, he was troubled by the pre-predicative state to which phenomenology appealed as the basis of its knowledge.
‘Phenomenology,’ he wrote, ‘wants to go back to the origin of the world, in order to account for all worldly knowledge in general.’24 But there is a problem here. How, in what Thao refers to as the ‘rhapsody of sensations’, can we experience an ‘originary’ moment, and form, for instance, an apple tree? How can we take this undifferentiated unity and extract the apple tree, without already having a sense of this determination itself? Transcendental subjectivity presupposes the very thing it is supposed to produce. Or, as Thao put it:
It is all too clear that the genesis of antepredicative experience, the masterpiece of the Weltkonstitution [world constitution], was posited in reality on a ground incompatible with the philosophical framework on which it had been conceived.25
Husserl had maintained that the reduction required a suspension of the normal belief in the world, and yet required that the essential component of the perceptual act is a conviction in the existence of objects and their transcendental constitution as objects. On top of this, Husserl was forced to argue for what he called ‘apperception’. If I see the front of an apple tree, I somehow intuit the rest of it. Again, I must already have the concept of the apple tree, or each new apple tree, otherwise it and any other object I encounter for the first time would be baffling in ways that new objects don’t tend to be in reality.
Derrida did not adopt all of Thao’s thinking – he felt that the second half of the book, which attempted to overcome the contradiction through dialectical materialism, was a ‘dead end’ – but he enthusiastically took up the question of pre-predicative experience, of origin and of the idea of genesis, with which Husserl himself had battled.
Derrida notes that it is much more difficult to identify, describe and analyse a particular moment in time than it is to do so with a particular point in space – standing in front of our apple tree for instance. It is a problem Husserl was aware of – in his 1907 lecture series, ‘The Idea of Phenomenology’, he noted that ‘as soon as we even make the attempt to undertake the analysis of pure subjective time-consciousness we are involved in the most extraordinary difficulties, contradictions and entanglements’.26 These were difficulties which, at various times, Husserl grappled with, elided, glossed over and – as Derrida was to identify and deconstruct – unconsciously ignored.
In two of his most memorable phrases, Husserl described life in Ideas I as ‘the flowing thisness’, such that ‘incessantly the world of physical things, and, in it, our body, are perceptually there.’27 All experience entails a temporal horizon, with time-consciousness at the basis of all intentional acts, as we experience all spatial acts, whether the object is stationary or not, as temporal, but not all temporal acts as spatial (speaking a sentence is an example of a temporal act that is not spatial). Time-consciousness is, as Husserl noted, the most ‘important and difficult of all phenomenological problems.’
Immersed in the flowing thisness, we stand again before our apple tree. If time-consciousness was merely succession, one thing constantly being replaced by another, we would never be able to create the tree out of our successive impressions, which we obviously do. Again, how? For Husserl the answer was as synthesis – we take these successive impressions and synthesise them into a unity:
Perception is a process of streaming from phase to phase; in its own way each of the phases is a perception, but these phases are continuously harmonized in the unity of a synthesis, in the unity of a consciousness of one and the same perceptual object that is constituted here originally. In each phase we have primordial impression, retention and protention … it is a unity of continual concordance.28
Retention and protention are not, simply, memory and anticipation. They are structurally embedded in, and constituent of, any ‘present’. A now is ‘always essentially an edge-point in an interval of time’.29 To use Husserl’s favoured example:
When, for example a melody sounds, the individual notes do not completely disappear when the stimulus or the action of the nerve excited by them comes to an end. When the new note sounds, the one just preceding it does not disappear without a trace; otherwise we should be incapable of observing the relations between the notes which follow one another … On the other hand, it is not