Abstract

Husserl’s “Fifth Meditation” is an effort to establish intersubjectivity, the necessary passage to the Objective world. Two conflicting tendencies govern Husserl’s discourse here: 1) a privileged desire to maintain the primacy of the monadic Ego, which is 2) the origin of a desire to recognize the other and thus to secure intersubjectivity. By focusing on the conflict between these tendencies and on his abrupt introduction of the body into the text in an attempt to resolve them, I try to show through “something like” a deconstruction that Husserl does not resolve the problem of the other but begins and ends this key chapter in an impasse.