An Event, Perhaps. Peter Salmon
have a chord of simultaneous notes or rather a disharmonious jumble of sounds.30
A note in a melody is not heard in isolation, an originary point in the flux of time cannot, as Husserl hopes to argue, be pre-predicative. It always already requires categories and structures, in the same way that Thao had identified with concepts.
Husserl, notes Derrida, ‘takes the demand for absolute beginning and the temporality of the lived experience as the ultimate philosophical reference.’31 Genesis, which one might call the originary moment under the effects of time – each moment being a moment of ‘becoming’ – is problematic precisely as it occurs in time and thus requires the synthesis of protention and retention.
Jackie’s dissertation homed in on this contradiction – this aporia, a word he was to use for the first time in this work, and which remained a key to this thought. From the Greek a- (without) and poros (passage), the word appears frequently in Plato. In fact, one of the goals of Socrates’ dialogues is to force his interlocutor into an aporia by interrogating a concept (e.g. virtue) until the interlocutor is forced to admit he does not know its meaning. But where for Socrates the goal was to resolve the aporia in some sense, for Derrida, as we shall see, the goal was to keep an aporia in suspension, to, in Gabriel Marcus’s terms, prevent a mystery being reduced to a problem.
In a move worthy of his later deconstructive texts, Jackie notes that, despite constantly asserting that he wishes to analyse the pre-predicative temporal, and that he regards this as having primacy over the spatial, Husserl only ever uses spatial examples when carrying out his analyses. ‘In spite of frequent allusions at no time does time intervene in a decisive fashion.’32
Examples of this spatial bias abound in Ideas I: ‘Lying in front of me is a piece of paper …’ (69); ‘Constantly seeing this table and meanwhile walking around it …’ (86); ‘we walk through the Gallery in Dresden …’ (250); ‘This is black, an inkpot, this black inkpot is not white is, if white, not black …’; and even in the realm of the imaginary, ‘Let us generate optional intuitions in phantasy of physical things, such as free intuitions of winged horses, white ravens, golden mountains and the like…’ (356). Again and again Husserl, notes Derrida, ‘stops at becoming, turning it into eidos’.33 Where Husserl had written, in his 1905 The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, ‘Naturally we all know what time is; it is that which is most familiar,’ it had revealed itself as that which, if familiar, remained most uncanny, and which threw doubt on his whole philosophical project. As Jackie noted, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness was never finished, never published as a completed work. The subject had proved too difficult.
There exists only one piece of footage of Husserl. Shot by James L. Adams when the philosopher was seventy-seven years old, two years before he died in 1938, it shows Husserl with his wife, Malvine, walking in an unidentified garden in summer. Husserl performs for the camera the part of the peripatetic philosopher. Suited, wearing sunglasses, he carries in his left hand his hat, and gestures emphatically with his right, to a nodding Malvine. Twice the camera zooms in to show him from the waist up; he stops speaking and returns the gaze of the camera as one would if being photographed. He stops talking, blinks at the camera, resumes. His image slides and wobbles, extends and shrinks back, as if viewed through bent plastic. It is pixelated into large square blocks; we are seeing and not seeing Husserl. The camera draws back and Malvine performs asking a question, to which Husserl performs replying. The footage ends with another closeup, or perhaps this is the same one.
At the time he was captured on film in the sunny garden Husserl was working on his last great work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, which would remain unfinished. He was writing it in the shadow of catastrophe. In 1936 Europe was sick, as Husserl wrote in his Vienna lecture, ‘The Crisis of European Humanity’, and the human sciences were incapable of effecting a cure.
Three years earlier, in April 1933, he had been first suspended from his professorship at Freiburg University for being a Jew, despite that fact that both he and Malvine had converted to Lutheranism almost fifty years earlier. Both their sons had served in the German army in the First World War – the younger one losing his life – and his daughter had served as a field nurse. Two weeks later he had all his academic privileges terminated in accordance with the National Reich law of April 28, relegated, as he put it, to ‘the non-Aryan dung heap’.34
Between these two events, on 21 April, his former student Martin Heidegger, who had dedicated his Being and Time to Husserl, had been appointed as rector of the University. In May, shortly after joining the Nazi Party, Heidegger gave his notorious rectorship address, ‘The Self-Assertion of the German University’, in which he – partially or fully, consciously or unconsciously, tactically or venally, the debate rages on – aligned the goals of the university, its ‘historical mission’ no less, with those of the Third Reich. Heidegger remained a member of the Nazi Party until the end of the Second World War.
Supporters of Heidegger have sometimes parsed his actions to the point where black is white, and where his extolling of the Führer Principle is ‘an occurrence of unveiling, a fate-laden happening upon thought’.35 They have pointed out, for instance, that the decision to suspend Husserl was taken by Heidegger’s predecessor, and that the decision to terminate his academic privileges was simply the law. But Husserl himself was less sanguine. In a letter to another former student, Dietrich Mahnke, he wrote:
The perfect conclusion to this supposed bosom friendship of two philosophers was his very public, very theatrical entrance into the Nazi Party on May 1. Prior to that there was his self-initiated break in relations with me – in fact, soon after his appointment at Freiburg – and, over the last few years, his anti-Semitism, which he came to express with increasing vigor – even against the coterie of his most enthusiastic students, as well as around the department.36
This, he believed, was simply part of a wider cataclysm, which philosophy seemed incapable of explaining or preventing. For Husserl, this slide into barbarity, which had seen him lose most of his German students and in 1937 saw him lose his house, was intertwined with the deeply melancholy realisation that ‘philosophy as a science, as a serious, rigorous, indeed apodictically rigorous science – the dream is over.’37
In The Crisis Husserl grapples with intersubjectivity and what he would call ‘the life-world’ – the ‘coherent universe of existing objects … valid for our consciousness as existing precisely through living together’ – which he recognised complicated his phenomenological project. But Husserl grappling with complications is, in a sense, Husserl par excellence. Few thinkers in the history of philosophy have tussled so unremittingly with their own ideas as he did, each book taking on the last, refining it, refuting it – one might cheekily say, deconstructing it. And in 1936, for Husserl the philosopher the difficulty had become, as it had become for Husserl the man, history and other people. How was one to find, in all this time and all these other beings – a point of origin from which to describe being?
Time – and history – which he hoped to hold at bay, kept asserting themselves, as problems that could not be bracketed off. Derrida’s dissertation concludes, melodramatically but effectively, with Husserl’s words to his sister during his final illness.
Just when I am getting to the end and when everything is finished for me, I know that I must start everything again from the beginning.38
On reading the published edition of The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy in 1990, the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy wrote to Derrida that the incredible thing about the work was that ‘you can’t find the young Derrida in it … the genesis of Derrida, yes, but not the young Derrida. He’s already completely there, fully armed and helmeted like Athena.’39 This was not simply a question of style, voice and concerns. In the dissertation we see, in utero, concepts that would remain central to Derrida’s thought – the aporia, the decision, undecidability and, in that suspension of judgement, that retaining of a contradiction without privileging