> 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.
>
Yup. And I like the bringing back in of Badiou, as well. It was reading Derrida's Introduction to the Origin of Geometry in grad school that ran me back to Husserl (specifically, in my case, I got my hands on Cartesian Meditations, because I wanted to see what he did with Descartes), and of course I can't think of anything worth disagreeing with in Chris's response, either (re: Heidegger and Husserl). There's no getting around the importance of Heidegger to Derrida.
But I do think you are onto something on the mathematical or metamathematical. Not that Derrida is really that way, but I suppose I think he is not really that way in the same, er, way that Plato's Socrates was so often not really that way. That is, there is a certain underlying methodological mathematicism. I'm not sure this is right. I'm still working it out, but I think there's something implicit at times, and explicit at others, that draws Derrida in this direction, and where I think that despite Badiou's rejection of Derrida, there is a way in which his work is a logical sort of next step (at least for me) from the critique in which Derrida was engaged for so long (although his later work is different in some important respects on this score from his earlier work). And of course it has to do with questions of truth and poltics. There is a lot in Rorty's appropriation of Derrida that I like, but at the end of the day, Rortian pragmatism is unsatisfactory, to me at least -- or anyway it doesn't get where we want to go.
Anyway, to put it entirely too briefly, and probably incorrectly, at least on the Badiou side: the deferral of différance seems to correspond in some important way with Badiou's understanding of the limit of forcing. Where I am wondering if Badiou improves on Derrida is on having a way of framing this in terms of truths that is ultimately more useful. That is, when I read Badiou on this, it felt like a sublime expression of what I thought was actually kind of the point with Derridean philosophy. But that's me and I'm probably just a crank.
So I just played fast and loose with a whole lot of stuff. Sorry. But it was fun. :)
j