Abstract

According to Kevin Mulligan, Derrida’s interpretation of Husserl in Speech and Phenomena gets the later wrong on almost every count, comprising an egregious example of a logic in the Parisian sense. In his reading Derrida seeks to undo the distinction, not just between the imagined word and the perceived word, but between imaginative and perceptual presentations in general. He also falls prey to the mentalist thesis that a subject is aware of the states he is in, a thesis not applicable to speech. Derrida goes on to make a failed psychologistic attempt to display the role of death in our uses of signs, and claims that sign and meaning idealities command the totality of their actual and possible instantiations and therefore represent these, such that the resulting mixed species has the magical properties of being active and efficient. I argue that Derrida’s interpretation of Husserl is far more accurate than Mulligan allows, and that his work is only susceptible to the final objection. His text needs to be read again so as to get the greater part of it right.