Teadvuse dekonstruktsioon: Husserli fenomenoloogia Nietzsche ja Derrida vahel / Deconstruction of Consciousness: Husserl’s Phenomenology between Nietzsche and Derrida
Authors: Sooväli Jaanus 
Published: December 2024

Teesid: Käesolev artikkel uurib, kuidas Friedrich Nietzsche ning Jacques Derrida dekonstrueerivad husserliku teadvuse kui vahetu (enese)teadmise asupaiga. Derrida, kes on tuntud kui poststrukturalismi üks klassikuid, alustas fenomenoloogia rajaja Edmund Husserli tõlgendaja ja uurijana. Oma teoses „Hääl ja fenomen“ dekonstrueerib ta üksikasjalikult Husserli märgi- ja teadvusekäsituse. Huvitaval kombel kattub see dekonstruktsioon teatud olulistes osades Nietzsche teadvusekriitikaga ta teoses „Rõõmus teadus“. Artiklis tõlgendan ning analüüsin nende kolme autori asjassepuutuvaid tekstikohti ning avan selle kaudu nii Nietzsche, Husserli kui ka Derrida filosoofiat tervikuna ning ühtlasi fenomenoloogia suhet poststrukturalismi.

In this article, I investigate the main arguments by means of which Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida deconstruct Husserlian consciousness as the site of immediate (self)knowledge. Jacques Derrida is known as one of the founders of poststructuralism, but it is by no means uninteresting that he started as a Husserl scholar and interpreter, translating his text ‘Origins of Geometry’ into French and writing a long and detailed introduction to it. In his early book Speech and Phenomena (1967), Derrida deconstructs Husserl’s conceptions of signs and consciousness. Interestingly, this deconstruction, in quite essential and crucial ways, reminds us of Nietzsche’s criticism of the self-presence of consciousness in his book The Gay Science. By close reading of some of the texts of these three authors the intricate relationship between phenomenology and poststructuralism will be explained and historically situated.
The article first analyses Husserl’s conception of signs and what it means for the constitution of meaning in human consciousness. Husserl distinguishes between meaningful signs, expressions, and indicative signs, indications which do not have meaning by themselves, but which intimate, point towards meaning. Husserl then shows that in communication, expression as a meaningful sign always has to function also as an indication because it indicates to the hearer that the speaker has such and such sense-giving inner experiences and intentions. He then poses the question about the real and pure sphere of meaning where all kinds of indications are excluded. This sphere according to him is ‘solitary mental life’ (das einsame Seelenleben). It is important for Husserl that in solitary mental life we do not use real speech, real signifiers anymore, but only imagined words, (re)presented speech, thus the ideal form of signifiers. This reduction of the signifier is crucial for Husserl because it helps to guarantee the purity and presence of the meanings. Thus, in solitary mental life, where we only use imagined words, the meanings are instantly present to us since they do not have to make a detour over or through material signifiers.
In his elaborate analysis Derrida deconstructs the main distinctions that Husserl makes in the first of the ‘Logical Investigations’, that is, the distinction between expression and indication, and real speech and imagined speech. The article provides a detailed analysis of Derrida showing that also in the solitary mental life we cannot really get rid of indications as meaningless signs, and hence the purity of meaning is contaminated and the self-presence of the subject undermined. In other words, Derrida demonstrates that the idea of ‘imagined words’ always presupposes a number of representations which intervene in the supposed purity of the solitary mental life. The solitary mental life cannot thus free itself from communication because it also communicates—namely, to itself, and by means of the ‘imagined speech’ which always refers back to real speech.
The article then shows that with his argumentation and critique of Husserl, especially with his insight regarding the functioning of signs, Derrida in a way also lays the theoretical ground for Roland Barthes’s famous short essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (which itself seems to lack that ground) which is the main text of poststructuralist theory of literature.
The last part of the article analyses Nietzsche’s criticism of consciousness and shows that it anticipates many of the same points that Derrida made in his criticism. Nietzsche calls his critique ‘possibly extravagant conjecture’ and demonstrates that consciousness is always, and already from the very beginning, contaminated by relations to the other, thus, by communication and language, and precisely for that reason it can never serve as a site of immediate (self)knowledge that Husserl was looking for. The similarities between Nietzsche’s and Derrida’s arguments are not necessarily surprising because from early on Derrida was an avid reader of Nietzsche.