``anyway, maybe i'm really Derridean rather than Deconstructionist, but i leave it to people who care about such labels (whether as badges of honor/club membership, or, alternatively, as a scarlet D of shame)...''
Jeffery Fisher
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I think you are going to like this connection. I was trying to track it down the other day. Derrida is usually linked to Heidegger. But I think a much more important influence was Husserl. See Speech and Phenomena, and other essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, J. Derrida, Northwestern, 1973.
The importance is not so much Derrida's deconstruction of Husserl as it is Husserl's attempt to understand how symbol and meaning, consciousness and its object of thought work together. I can't remember the detail. The most important part about Husserl is where he started in his philosophy studies. Guess where?
``He initially studied mathematics at the universities of Leipzig (1876) and Berlin (1878), under Karl Weierstrass and Leopold Kronecker. ...
...In these first works he tries to combine mathematics, psychology and philosophy with a main goal to provide a sound foundation for mathematics. He analyzes the psychological process needed to obtain the concept of number and then tries to build up a systematical theory on this analysis. To achieve this he uses several methods and concepts taken from his teachers. From Weierstrass he derives the idea that we generate the concept of number by counting a certain collection of objects. From Brentano and Stumpf he takes over the distinction between proper and improper presenting...''
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Husserl
For those who don't know Weirstrass and Kronecker were working on among other things the metamathematical problems with the real numbers, infinite sums, and such. In short, you have to imagine something is infinite because all you have is a finite world to start with. Therefore a concept like infinity is a purely imaginary form.
Do you see what's going on here? Husserl's objects of consciousness seems to be too self absorbed when they address ordinary thought and the world. But most of that phenomenology becomes much more useful and insightful if it is devoted to the concept of number and problems with the sum of an infinite series for example and host of other mathematical-philosophical issues.
Deconstruction reads and sounds like gibberish, maybe, until you try to start working with something like its methods to try to figure out what some meta-mathematical problem is about. I am not saying that's deconstruction. I am saying I recognize the kind of thought process Husserl was working on much better, when I put those kinds of thoughts into studying math.
Which reminds me, I haven't gotten back to Badiou's Number book yet.
Just to recall some math history, I think the break down in concepts of `rationality' was on going all over the place in mid to late-19thC European thought, writing, philosophy and math. It was a cultural phenomenon with deep roots in all kinds of social forces converging.
It would be interesting to know how much of these traces Derrida actually knew about. The way he writes about Husserl doesn't sound like it.
CG