Indifference

Derrida beyond Husserl, intentionality, and desire

pp. 125-153

in: Jason Alvis, Marion and Derrida on the gift and desire, Berlin, Springer, 2016

Abstract

This chapter exclusively focuses on the ways in which Derrida conceives of the insufficiencies of Husserlian phenomenology, especially "intentionality" as it might relate with desire. Since Derrida calls for an "impossible" relation with the future "to-come" that is out of the reach of "my will or desire," Husserlian "directedness" must be replaced with différance, the differing and deferring of which are experienced intuitively through an openness and "indifference." Différance disrupts phenomenological presence by "procuring it" for "its openness" to something otherwise, and this chapter will pose that Derrida's rejection of the possibility of "desire" in the intentional structure of Husserlian phenomenology is a central and formative development in the early stages of deconstruction. The rejections of intentional consciousness, which for Derrida amount to a rejection of desire, are sutured to his other concerns for phenomenology, such as its conceptions of the transcendental, temporality, "the sign," history, and teleology. In the end, the will (and with it, desire) must be defeated, for it is an "adversed mobility" of going out of "oneself and returning into oneself."