Jacques Derrida and the Future

Abstract

This chapter first explores the centrality of Husserl’s work in Jacques Derrida’s articulation of the project of deconstruction by highlighting the ‘irreducible complicity’ between Husserl’s sought-after ‘pre-expressive stratum of sense’ and his commitment to the expressibility of all conscious experience. It then addresses the question concerning the task of philosophy in Husserl’s wake, given the apparent fragmentation of the continental tradition, arguing that philosophy’s task is the active disruption of the doxa in pursuit of the fundamental. Finally, it argues, based upon a reading of Husserl’s living present and a critique of his primal impression, that the fundamental must be thought as productive relationality, the past and future dually brought forth in the present which is nothing more than the relation between the two.